

FREDERICK 
GUN DEL FINGER 





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ESSAYS 
<f ELIHU 

by 

George Frederick Gundelfinger 

(Author of “Ten Years at Yale”) 


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THE NEW FRATERNITY 


THE NEW FRATERNITY 
Literature & Music 
Sewickley, Pennsylvania 













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NOTE 


The essays published in this little volume 
have each been printed earlier in pamphlet- 
form— Football and Warfare in 1917, Prince 
Albert’s Velvet Tuxedo in 1918 (and again, 
revised, in 1920) and The Passing of Brother 
GreeTc in 1921. In pamphlet-form they were 
distributed free among American college men 
—particularly and regularly among the under¬ 
graduates of Yale, for which university they 
were, in the main, written; hence, the title 
under which they are here collected in more 
permanent form for future reference and for 
perpetuating the influence they have had in 
the past. ; 


Copyright, 1923. 
George F. Gundelfinger. 





Essays of Elihu 


Football and Warfare . 7 

Prince Albert’s Velvet Tuxedo . 25 

The Passing of Brother Creek. .. 57 












Football and Warfare 








* 








Football and Warfare 


A little more than a decade ago, football underwent 
radical reforms which made the game “safe and sane.** 
So said Mr. Arthur B. Reeve in the Independent for 
November 1906. (I happened to resurrect it the 
other day among the dust-covered back numbers of 
various periodicals through which I was searching for 
information of an essentially different nature.) 

Mr. Reeve, then just out of Princeton, is now a 
popular writer of detective stories, in which the detec¬ 
tions are characterized by a gift of imagination even 
more acute than that which brought to light the message 
in his earlier contribution to the press. Nevertheless 
Mr. Reeve’s imaginary discovery was founded on real 
statistics; he placed an order with a newspaper-clip- 
ping bureau for the accounts of all injuries, fatal and 
otherwise, which were to be inflicted on the gridiron 
during two successive seasons. 

The various injuries follow: Broken collarbones, 
broken legs, sprained ankles, wrenched hips, twisted 
knees, concussion of the brain, kicks in the head, 
broken arms, dislocated shoulders, broken ribs, broken 
noses, broken jaws, gouged-out eyes, broken fingers, 
broken hands, broken shoulder blades, water on the 
knee, ruptured intestines, bruised legs, bruised backs, 
fractured breast bones, dislocated elbows, kicks in the 


8 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


stomach, fractured skulls, dislocation of the spine, 
abscess on the brain, burst blood vessels, blood poison¬ 
ing, intercranial hemorrhage, cerebral hemorrhage, 
subdural hemorrhage, meningitis, peritonitis and 
broken neck. 

Mr. Reeve is at one time sufficiently unimaginative 
to admit that the list is “gruesome,” and at another 
sufficiently truthful to admit that it is “incomplete.” 
But that his passion for pigskin is stronger than his 
compassion on human flesh is seen in the remark: 
“Three broken jaws, two eyes gouged out, one player 
bitten and another knocked unconscious three times in 
the same game are proud records of 1905 that 1906 
did not duplicate.” 

Comparing the number of specific injuries for one 
year with the number for the other, he concludes opti¬ 
mistically that the “new” football of 1906 is a more 
“truly American” game than the old football of 1905. 
Up to the tenth of November, he counts three deaths 
and fifty-four injuries in 1906 as compared with 
twenty-two deaths and ninety-six injuries in 1905. It 
should be noted that the tenth of November is prob¬ 
ably the date on which his copy was due, but not the 
date of the final contest of the season. I call your 
attention to this fact for fear you may not observe the 
three lines of 4-point with which the editor has pref¬ 
aced Mr. Reeve’s article and in which he somewhat 
untactfully states that he is glad to print it that week 
(Nov. 22nd.) “between the two greatest football 
matches of the season.” 

It would have been rather unfavorable for the 
future of football if during the first year of reformed 
playing, Mr. Reeve had not revealed a marked falling 
off in the number of fatalities and injuries. Such a 
report naturally renewed enthusiasm and assured wor- 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


9 


ried mothers the safety of their hero sons. Conse¬ 
quently the game was allowed to march on triumph¬ 
antly for years to come, irrespective of casualties. 

After reading Mr. Reeve’s article, I became rather 
curious to know if football had remained “truly 
American’’ in the years following. Although I was 
engaged, during those years, in graduate work and 
teaching at a university where football was considered 
“the’* thing, I had taken only a mild interest in the 
game as played there or elsewhere. So, rather than 
relying on my memory, I looked up the literature on 
the subject. In the same publication—the Independ¬ 
ent —just three years after the appearance of Mr. 
Reeve’s article, I found an editorial strongly denounc¬ 
ing football in view of the fact that its harvest for the 
year abounded in thirty deaths and two-hundred-and- 
sixteen injuries, many of the specific injuries in Mr. 
Reeve’s list having increased in number by ten. I 
passed over another interval of three years and read in 
the Literary Digest that at West Point alone there 
were sixty-one injuries in the Fall of 1912, eighteen 
per cent of which were of a serious nature, liable to 
cause future trouble or premature death. So I lost 
all hope of ever finding another “truly American** 
season. 

Were all these injuries purely accidental? 

In the Atlantic Monthly , February 1914, another 
aspect of football was brought before the thinking pub¬ 
lic through two articles: “Athletics and the School’’ 
by Headmaster Alfred E. Stearns of Phillips Acad¬ 
emy, Andover, and “Athletics and the College” by 
Professor C. A. Stewart, then at the University of 
Idaho and formerly active in athletics and teaching at 
Columbia. 


10 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


“Many thoughtful men, occupying positions of 
influence in college administration,” says Professor 
Stewart, “are at present contemplating with alarm 
abuses which have crept into this phase of undergrad¬ 
uate activity, abuses which to them seem so serious and 
so deeply rooted as to justify the abolition of the whole 
system of intercollegiate contests. These abuses, he 
explains, “have nothing to do with the roughness of 
some of the games, or with the conflict between play 
and work; they have to do with the pernicious influence 
of athletics upon the moral life of the whole under¬ 
graduate body.” He then goes on to cite a few typical 
and convincing instances, after which he adds: “in 
short, college men have in regard to their sports a 
standard of honor—if we may call it such—which per¬ 
mits practices not tolerated in any other walk of life.” 

Headmaster Stearns shows that this “standard of 
conduct” is characteristic not only of college athletics 
but that its germination often begins in the preparatory 
or high school. He believes, however, that the offend¬ 
ing player should not be unduly blamed, claiming that 
he is strongly influenced both by the cheering section 
and by the coach. 

Psychologists tell us that men who have been 
contemplating, with hesitance, the committal of a 
crime are often brought to the point of strangling, 
shooting or stabbing their victims after taking a 
draught of liquor. It should be evident that the 
liquor serves to weaken the conscience rather than 
strengthen the courage of the criminal. It is prob¬ 
ably absurd to believe that liquor alone will make 
a criminal, but it is doubtlessly true that there 
would be far fewer acts of violence committed 
without it. Heredity, environment, failure and 
association have much to do with the sowing of the 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


11 


sordid seeds over which the unfortunate devils brood. 

Perhaps my analogy is not evenly balanced—per¬ 
haps I have weighted one side with too much morbid¬ 
ity, but it will help to show which of the two evils 
mentioned by the Headmaster is the greater. Any one 
who has attended a big football game must have been 
at times deafened by the mad yelping which is com¬ 
monly referred to as the support from the students in 
the stands to the fellows on the field. This “support” 
corresponds to the deciding draught of liquor. But I 
do not believe that this clamor, impulsive as it is, would 
alone inflame a player to win the victory “at any 
price.” It is the final though momentary impetus, but 
the desire to win and the means for winning were 
gradually imbibed through the daily contact with the 
coach during practice. 

I shall quote here Headmaster Stearns* picture of 
the coach: “Almost without exception the coach is 
actuated primarily, if not solely, by the desire to win. 
And in my experience it makes little difference whether 
he be an amateur or a professional. His power on the 
field is unlimited. His influence over the boys he in¬ 
structs is tremendous. His word is law. To disobey 
him is to invite ostracism or dismissal from the squad. 
Often he is vulgar and profane. Sometimes he is 
brutal. Seldom does he exhibit, on the football field 
at least, those qualities which are demanded of a gen¬ 
tleman. And yet, with all these deadly influences at 
his command, he is allowed the utmost liberty to work 
upon the plastic characters of our youth. With free¬ 
dom from all wholesome restraint, he is permitted to 
sow in fertile soil those tares which in their later 
growth are bound to choke the intellectual, moral and 
spiritual growth of our boys and ruin in advance the 
expected harvest.” 


12 FOOTBALL AND WAEFAKE 

The daily association with such a character cannot 
fail to plant immoral tendencies in the undergraduate, 
and if football practice were continued and if big 
games were played throughout the college year, it is 
not improbable that the stars of the gridiron would 
become chronic criminals. As it is, the temporary state 
of their minds, during those days which follow a 
depressing defeat and precede another opportunity, 
must resemble somewhat the criminal state in its 
incipiency. 

Unlike the criminal, however, the undergraduate 
does not ponder over and finally commit a disgraceful 
act for the selfish gratification of any personal desire 
or to quench the thirst of revenge for a misfortune that 
has darkened only his own life. He does not lie in 
wait for the adversary of last week’s team who knocked 
him unconscious; but he is dreaming nevertheless of 
how he might save the day by tackling, none too gently 
some as-yet-unknown player in next week’s game. 

It is an indisputable fact that a student will do things 
for his school or his college that he would never think 
of doing for himself—not only bad things but good 
things also. He may, for example, be willing to throw 
himself, heart and soul, into a movement for raising a 
university fund from which he is not likely to receive 
any benefits; and he may also be willing to throw him¬ 
self, flesh and bone, against a former friend if the lat¬ 
ter’s disablement would help win a gridiron victory for 
the same institution. It is deplorable that the same 
name—loyalty—should be applied to the motives 
which transform the same individual into a Dr. Jekyll 
and a Mr. Hyde respectively. 

Loyalty for one’s Alma Mater, as it dawns on the 
freshman and continues to dazzle before the eyes of the 
alumni, is, after all, a pliable sort of thing, and only 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


13 


under the influence of a leader not yet arrived can it 
be molded into a permanent form which alone will be 
worthy of the name. Let such a leader step forward! 
He must be a hero whose moral courage will outshine 
the brute strength and endurance of the most lauded 
athlete; his influence must not only counteract but anni¬ 
hilate the influence of the coach; his message must ring 
so clearly with truth and faith that the cheers and jeers 
of the mad multitude shall be as silence in comparison. 

Now in 1917, football again comes into the lime¬ 
light for discussion in America. The chief reasons 
why the colleges were the first to respond to the 
nation’s call for volunteers in the present world-con¬ 
flict are: first, football is the most closely related to 
warfare of all our games; second, football is almost 
exclusively a college sport. 

There is probably no other sport in the form of a 
contest between two groups of men in which a greater 
number of injuries and fatalities are involved. But it 
is not the fact that football needs a diminutive Red 
Cross of its own that makes it a war in miniature. 
When a ship capsizes or when a theatre collapses or 
even when a munition plant blows up in times of peace, 
there is also need for a Red Cross. No; it is not Mr. 
Reeve’s gruesome list of “accidents,” but rather the 
revelations of Headmaster Stearns and Professor 
Stewart that give the gridiron the color of the battle¬ 
field. Muscle and ammunition will, in general, do no 
harm unless there be that intention behind them. 

So it is not only his physical development which 
makes a star of the football field a good soldier; it is 
the fact that he has become more capable of dealing a 
disabling blow to an adversary without hurting his own 
heart or conscience. There are some big-hearted men, 


14 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


more ruddy and robust than the stars, whose eyes 
would fill with tears were they asked to injure even a 
butterfly. Football squads have been organized at our 
national cantonments not so much for hardening the 
muscles as for hardening the heart of the conscript. 

As a matter of fact, the game of football has been 
officially condemned as being not only unbeneficial but 
even detrimental to the physical welfare of the soldier. 
This condemnation has been voiced both by Colonel 
Townsley, Superintendent of the United States Mil¬ 
itary Academy, and by General Stokes, Head of the 
Bureau of Medicine and Surgery of the United States 
Navy. 

But the physical welfare of a soldier in times of 
peace becomes a negligible thing in times of war; for 
his country’s welfare is then foremost, and for it the 
soldier’s welfare must be sacrificed not only physically 
but also morally and mentally if necessary. War is 
hell, and under its intense white heat, man, as an 
individual human being, becomes practically nothing 
—a mere cog of bone and blood in a gigantic devas¬ 
tating and devouring machine which continues to grind 
up and grate up similar cogs in a similar machine, irre¬ 
spective of any finite loss in the number of its own— 
for the cogs, so it often seems, can be replaced 
ad infinitum. It is football raised (or shall I say 
lowered) to the nth degree. An all-dementing patriot¬ 
ism supersedes a disgraceful loyalty. Restraint and 
morality become things that never were. The nonre¬ 
luctance of a player toward disabling his opponent is 
not only transformed into willingness but metamor¬ 
phosed into the soldier’s lustful determination to kill. 
He needs neither a draught of liquor nor a cheering 
section to egg him on or to produce oblivion; already 
the thunderous bursting of bombs, the blistering glare 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


15 


of liquid fire and the rodent action of poison gas have 
deprived him of senses and conscience. He loses his 
mind long before his body is shattered, but the cog of 
bone and blood continues to do its bit, unconscious of 
the when, the why or the how. 

And yet, to do its bit insanely well on the battle¬ 
field, a certain sort of “mental training” is prerequisite, 
and football in times of peace, though denounced phys¬ 
ically, is said to furnish it. 

“Football, more than any other sport,” claims a 
former Regular Army officer, “aims to co-ordinate the 
mental and physical activities under the spur of com¬ 
mand signals, which are generally similar to those of 
preparation and execution upon which military activ¬ 
ities are founded. 

“Football creates and develops the habit of unfal¬ 
teringly and instantly obeying the initiative given by a 
command when the person trained is in immediate 
contact with the maximum of opposition, whether the 
same be offensive or defensive, and in this way for¬ 
tifies the mentality in obeying orders at the moment 
when direct results may occur. 

“Any military man understands the value of this 
kind of training. It is desirable to have the sub-con¬ 
sciousness of a soldier trained from every practical 
angle along this line, and football offers mental train¬ 
ing under combat conditions and under the environ¬ 
ment where maximum energies are strained. 

“There is hardly a standard military work that 
somewhere in its treatment of fundamentals does not 
hold up football work as the ideal conception for men 
who wish to properly appreciate the work of an indi¬ 
vidual as part of a mass. 

“Probably one of the greatest advantages of foot- 


16 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


ball is that it develops the ideas comprehended in 
offense and defense almost as an instinct in the person 
trained.” 

It would be an extreme folly even to attempt to 
deny the wisdom of each and every word in the above 
quotations when applied to football as a preparation 
for war. When we must turn criminal against our 
will, it is natural that we should no longer desire to be 
individuals but long to become part of a mass in which 
every man so closely resembles us in purpose and 
appearance that we are lost sight of and feel no shame. 
Furthermore we wish to obey the terrible orders from 
another, rather than believe that they are the dictates 
of our own conscience; we want some one, not to lead 
us, but to spur us on to murder so that we need not feel 
that we are committing it of our own accord; we want 
to be trained by every possible means to do the dirty 
deed in a way which will make us least conscious of it. 
Guide us, O thou great Mephisto! 

But plainly as the above quotations of the former 
Regular Army officer show the merits of football as a 
mental trainer for the soldier at battle, still more plainly 
do they reveal the absolute worthlessness of such 
“mental training” from an educational standpoint— 
not only worthlessness but detrimentalness. 

To realize this most effectively let us transform the 
battlefield back into the college gridiron—in particular 
let the commander degenerate into the coach. But first 
allow me to quote the words of an untransformed com¬ 
manding-officer at one of our national encampments: 

“We’ve got to make these men dirty fighters. We’ve 
got to make them dirty in mind and action. They’ve 
got to be dirty in their facial expression. In every 
respect they’ve got to be dirty. They’ve got to have 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


17 


the vicious look that shows a purpose to kill, kill, kill.” 

Such a philosophy naturally sets the blood of a true 
intellectual as well as the blood of a great soldier aboil 
—with patriotism in the case of the latter, and with 
disgust and revolt in the case of the former. And yet 
the same intellectual must admit that without such a 
philosophy a victory on the battlefield would be not 
only highly improbable but impossible. At the moment 
the officer snarled out these words, he must have had 
froth on his fangs. Now football if not more sane is 
at least less insane than warfare, and as long as its aim 
is victory rather than exercise, the character of the 
coach must not be made more gentle but to a certain 
degree less brutal than the commander. He is not yet 
the infuriated tiger; he is the cub grown up but still 
without his first smell and taste of human blood. 

Now, knowing the “trainer,” even better than we 
knew him through the Headmaster’s description, let us 
compare the “mental training” derived from football 
with mental training as we understand it in an educa¬ 
tional institution. 

In the first place “the co-ordination of mental and 
physical activities” referred to is not at all the co-ordi¬ 
nation of mind and body in the same individual toward 
which education is constantly striving. The added 
phrase “under the spur of command” shows very 
clearly that football simply aims to bring about the 
co-ordination of the physical activities of the team as a 
whole with the psychical vision of the coach or driver. 
Indeed, in the very next paragraph, the Regular Army 
officer admits that “football creates and develops the 
habit of unfalteringly and instantly obeying the initia¬ 
tive by a command,” showing that, in reality, the play¬ 
ers are considered as mere members of a mob, who, in 


18 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


themselves are either devoid of mental foresight or at 
best have visions and ideas which must yield to those 
of their “leader.** The object of education, however, 
is not to produce mob-members, but leaders themselves 
—and respectable leaders at that. On the other hand, 
there is no objection to “fortifying the mentality’* of 
educated men in “obeying orders’’ if such orders are 
just and honorable, but when they are of such a nature 
that the man must be “trained in them subconsciously** 
instead ol allowing him to analyze them in conscious¬ 
ness before acting, then we must most emphatically call 
a halt. In conclusion, when the writer refers to the 
development of ideas comprehended in offense and 
defense “almost as an instinct,** he admits the tendency 
of football to turn out human animals rather than 
intellectual men. 

Yale boasts of the fact that only one of the twenty- 
two men who played on the Varsity Football Eleven 
a year ago and won their “Y** has returned to College; 
and that this one man is not yet of age. I doubt if 
this shows as much patriotism as it does a lack of inter¬ 
est and ability in things intellectual. Speaking of a 
certain class of men for whom war has a peculiar 
fascination, President Hibben of Princeton has said: 
“Conscious of the galling burden of a useless life, they 
hail the opportunity of war, that at last they may prove 
themselves of some service in the defense of the com¬ 
mon cause of their country.’* The athlete, above all 
other men, finds book-life “useless;** if, under the dis¬ 
guise of patriotism, he can make his service in the 
trenches count as credits towards an academic degree, 
he is making the same fool of his Alma Mater that he 
made of her on the gridiron; and if, while conferring 
his degree, she continues to pose as an institution of 
learning, she is also making the same fool of herself. 


FOOTBALL AND WABFARE 


19 


In these days when so many educators—and, in 
particular, so many of the hyper-educated—are, with 
trembling knees, willing to put the seals of their col¬ 
leges on khaki instead of sheepskin, it is wholesome to 
learn that there is still one who is sane enough and 
courageous enough to see and say that military service 
is not equivalent to education. I refer to Harvard’s 
President—Abbott Lawrence Lowell. 

The World-War of today, as we are told, is a war 
to abolish war. In the name of God, let us hope so— 
and let us hope also that it will abolish everything 
which resembles war, leads up to war and prepares for 
war, and which works similar ravages on the human 
race; for unless we abolish these things we shall never 
abolish war itself. 

Any one who has at heart the welfare of his fellow- 
men cannot help but feel a thrill over the blow which 
War has dealt to King Alcohol the world over—a 
blow from which he will probably never recover. In 
spite of all the things his enemies and critics had said 
or written against him, he managed to live on; it took 
a material stroke to vanquish him. 

That the Great War has already given football its 
first “kick in the head” is evident from the fact that 
Yale, Harvard and Princeton have temporarily abol¬ 
ished the big inter-collegiate games. This is a blow in 
comparison with which the resultant of all former 
thrusts from tongue and pen is imperceptible. It was 
claimed some time ago that football was an “impos¬ 
sible” intercollegiate sport and that the game should 
become purely intramural. The step which the “Big 
Three” have taken is undoubtedly a step in that and 
the right direction, for the spirit of competition will 
become less fierce and brutal. The gate receipts, of 


20 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


course, will suffer tremendously, and the people of the 
United States will be deprived of an amphitheatrical 
entertainment which is little more than a bloody rem¬ 
nant of Ancient Rome. Yet, if we are to lose our 
barbaric traits and become “truly American,” shall 
we not be more willing to see our gate receipts rather 
than our sons suffer tremendously? Our government 
has decided to deprive itself of the enormous revenue 
from alcohol, believing full well that prohibition will 
benefit the nation to a degree that cannot be measured 
in dollars and cents. Would our colleges and univer¬ 
sities not be more truly patriotic were they to live up to 
their country’s standard and make a similar sacrifice 
resulting in the general welfare of the student-body 
and in a realization of their own ideals? 

Therefore, after the War is over, let us hope that 
these leaders in higher education shall not recoil from 
the step which they have already taken. Rather let 
us hope that they shall take a second step forward and 
abolish football not only as an intercollegiate sport but 
also as an intramural one? Even if played between 
teams of the same university, the same evils of the 
intercollegiate game will exist though not with so much 
vividness. After all, what can be said in favor of 
football in any form either from a muscular, a moral 
or a mental standpoint? The only men acceptable 
for its ranks are those who are already physically fit; 
and when they leave the ranks they are, in general, 
physically injured, unhealthy in conduct, and dead 
weight in the class room. Morality itself may be best 
defined as the proper co-ordination of mind and body, 
and this football can never accomplish. 

In Fisher and Fisk’s Hoiv to Live , which has 
become America’s textbook on health, we are told that 


FOOTBALL AND WARFARE 


21 


“the razor edge of the mind needs daily honing through 
physical exercise.” Therefore, in no other community 
is physical exercise more essential than in a college. 
Yet there is no other community where this honing is 
so often overdone to the degree that the razor edge is 
shattered, or utterly undone leaving the mental metal 
edgeless. There will come a time when both the 
stupid lump of muscle and the anaemic grind will dis¬ 
appear from the campus. There will come a time 
when the specialized training for the few and the dis¬ 
regard for the many will be corrected by the proper 
attention for all. 

Of course there will always be those who say that 
without competition there will be degeneration. I agree 
with them. But the real meaning of competition has 
not yet found its way into our dictionaries. The com¬ 
petition that benefits is not the competition between two 
nations or two colleges or two persons; it is the effort 
of the individual nation or college or man to excel 
itself or herself or himself. 

This does not mean death to altruism, for there is a 
marked difference between gently lifting to our own 
level those who are beneath us and forcibly pushing 
ourselves up to the level of those who are our super¬ 
iors. The latter is the road to revolution and retro¬ 
gression; the former, the path to progress and peace. 












Prince Albert’s Velvet Tuxedo 



Prince Albert’s Velvet Tuxedo 


There are many who believe that the banishment, 
legal and actual, of King Alcohol from our midst is 
the panacea—now a reality—for ridding the country 
of all its evils. But the truth of the matter is that he 
had a fellow-conspirator who not only served as an 
indispensable entering wedge for the accomplishment 
of the King’s designs, but who also, under numerous 
disguises and noms de plume , accomplished designs of 
his own, bad enough in themselves, irrespective of the 
darker moods and acts to which they led—and this 
conspirator is still among us! And he is not mourning 
and declining over the death of his chief, but thriving 
and rejoicing over his own opportunity to ascend the 
deserted throne. 

The cigarette has always been the first temptation 
which the schoolboy has had to meet; and when he 
lighted it, he was generally lighting the way to the 
drink-habit. A grape-juice dinner with cigarettes was 
merely the prelude to a smoker with cocktails. Who 
ever saw a bar that was not enveloped in a cloud of 
tobacco-smoke or that was not amply equipped with 
good-sized cuspidors? Drinking without smokes was 
very dry pastime indeed. A saloon without a cigar- 
lighter on the counter would certainly have been a 
deserving candidate for the eighth wonder of the 


26 PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


world. One cannot say that smoking inevitably led to 
drinking, but no one will deny that the young men with 
stained fingers and trembling hands were the first to 
line up before the altar of Bacchus. 

Had prohibition been applied to the weed first, its 
application to the wine would have been a much lighter 
if not an eventually unnecessary task; and it would 
have removed an evil which still remains to undermine 
the health and ambitions of our younger men of promise 
rather than an evil which enabled our older and more 
hopeless degenerates to forget and drown their miseries. 

But we shall see why the other order was better 
adapted to the times. 

No evil fixes its grasp on a man all of a sudden. 
The final relentless clutch is the sum-total of numerous 
experiences, which seem trivial enough in themselves 
but which are, nevertheless, the forerunners of immor¬ 
ality and crime. No burglar ever began his profession 
by robbing a bank; he first stole a penny from his 
playmate or from his mother’s purse—and considered 
it a good joke. Lust never was and never will be the 
impulse behind a boy’s first illicit relation with a girl 
of the streets; it is the mere novelty—the fun of it— 
the fun which generally culminates in a terrible, uncon¬ 
trollable longing for its repetition at any cost. 

And it is not always the repetition but often the 
initiation which involves misery. Yet, knowing this 
in advance, the boy is goaded on by the senseless 
notion that he must not be so radically different from 
others. “Everybody’s doin’ it;’* and that is a neces¬ 
sary and sufficient reason why he should do it. He 
must be like his fellow-men. He has not the moral 
courage to obey the dictates of his own conscience. He 
must listen to others. He must join the common rabble. 


PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 27 


follow the crowd; otherwise he will be ridiculed or 
ostracized, and it is a sin to be either. Consequently 
he buys a box of cigarettes, and begins to smoke. He 
candidly admits that the first puff was just as obnoxious 
to him as was the taste of the foam which little Jack 
London took from the pail of beer he was carrying 
across the field to his father. 

Even the boy who does not join the crowd but drifts 
off to a corner to read his magazine may be influenced 
toward smoking by the very advertisements which are 
often inserted between the story and its continuation on 
a later page. 

I must admit that the advertising sections of the 
modern magazine are just as entertaining (and some¬ 
times as instructive) as the editorials, and I know that 
I am not far wrong when I assume that the most ser¬ 
ious readers will, with some reluctance perhaps, make 
the same confession. Such pages are always illumined 
with very up-to-date figures, printed oftentimes in 
attractive colors and accompanied by smart verses 
which bubble over with wit, rhyme and touching senti¬ 
ment. It is the overgrown child in our make-up that 
finds this semi-secret delight in anything which resem¬ 
bles a picture-book, and it is this very attitude that 
should make us so clearly aware of the danger, which 
confronts the young reader, in those temptations so 
cleverly concealed by the advertiser’s craft. The cut 
is always more fascinating than the print. In fact it is 
from the picture that we usually get the incentive to 
read the opposite page or, more likely, the advertise¬ 
ment which it illustrates; for it is incontrovertible that 
the young men and women who are portrayed in the 
“ads” are in general far superior in face, figure and 
fashion to those in the short stories and serials. 


28 PEINCE ALBEKT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


No hero of current fiction is half so handsome or so 
perfectly clad as he who smokes Velvet. No illus¬ 
trator is so careful in his delineation of men as he who 
draws the rah-rah-rah boys who claim that the Fatima 
cigarette is perfectly balanced: “just enough body to 
satisfy you and yet mild and delicate and aromatic.” 
One actually begins to think that it is the cigarette, 
even more than the clothes, that makes the man. Girls 
who always lose their heads over handsome fashion- 
plates conclude that he who declines tobacco is surely 
a back number. A man in his dinner-jacket, lolling 
before the fire, puffing away dreamily, contentedly, 
nome-lovingly—yes; Robert Louis Stevenson was quite 
right when he said that no girl should marry a man 
who does not smoke. 

This is the very impression the illustrator was paid 
to give to the reader, omitting the ash-bespattered 
carpet and the reeking spittoon. And even the hand¬ 
some, well-dressed man is picked and by no means 
typical of the majority who use your “dope.” If the 
use of tobacco seems to engender sociability and lend 
tranquility and contentment to the manner of some 
men, it is equally true that it turns a countless number 
into lazy good-for-nothings, worse bespattered than the 
carpet and almost as foul-smelling as the cuspidor 
itself. But how often are such prospective husbands 
portrayed in the advertisements, Mr. Stevenson? 

It may seem far-fetched to some of us to hear that 
a youth will take to smoking just because the smokers 
who figure in advertisements are such manly-looking 
men, but it cannot be disputed that a boy will indulge 
in a practice which is endorsed by the real man whom 
he idolizes—his favorite author, actor or athlete. It 
is generally the crude heroes of the baseball diamond 


PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 29 


who enjoy such notoriety, and all others who likewise 
condescend to having their names and faces attached 
to endorsements that end in smoke should be placed in 
the same category: grandstand players. 

These endorsements are a menace not only because 
they lure others into the pleasure of smoking but 
because they attribute success to it. Among those who 
commit such deceptions—it is to be regretted—there 
are always a few who have legitimately ascended the 
ladder of fame, but when they permit themselves to be 
bribed into signing such derogatory testimonials, it 
cannot help but lower their achievements a rung or two 
in the estimation of the higher and better judges. 

It is an erroneous belief that material stimulants and 
narcotics are the real forces behind the accomplishment 
of anything worth while. There is one field, however, 
where the use of them is considered least dispensable, 
and that is in creative art, where dream-power is abso¬ 
lutely essential. And yet the beauty of spontaneous 
expression in Nature is infinitely more exquisite than 
the ramblings of any “dope-fiend.” There is some¬ 
thing about a bird or a flower which makes me feel 
closer to The Creator. There is a natural glory in the 
silver voice of one and in the silent color of the other 
which seems to conduct God’s message more directly, 
more authentically and with a softer and more forceful 
purity. 

The minister who uses tobacco or liquor cannot 
write or deliver a Godly sermon. God refuses to 
speak—He cannot speak clearly through such a 
medium. The sermon may be a perfect counterfeit, 
but the minister who uses counterfeit sermons should 
be placed on the same level with him who manufact¬ 
ures counterfeit money. The pastor-impostor who 


30 PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


lately published the thought that the privilege to smoke 
during a sermon might be “the one thing that would 
induce men to attend church” was incidentally express¬ 
ing the fact that his discourses were in need of fum¬ 
igation. Everything accomplished by the aid of opium 
and wine is counterfeit, sham, imitation, artificial. It 
is anything but natural; it is not only without health, 
but even without life. It was inspired by an Egyptian 
Deity—not by the Christian God. It came out of a 
machine that had to be wound up with a key—a 
whis-key. So much rubbish! Nothing more. 

Read John Barleycorn if you would know the con¬ 
vincing confessions of a modern novelist whose mind 
was fertile only so long as his brain was irrigated with 
highballs. And what was the nature of the product 
which sprung from such soil? Rum-reeking tales of 
drunken hobos and pirates. But even Charles Rann 
Kennedy, whose main characters are generally envel¬ 
oped in so godly an atmosphere, is seen photographed, 
pipe in hand, revealing the unnaturalness of his inspi¬ 
rations. The influence of his favorite brand is easily 
discernible in his work. For example, his one-act 
drama ,—The Necessary Evil ,—which is “to be 
played in the light” (gaslight), opens with “the whole¬ 
some smell of tobacco,” and just before the fall of the 
curtain, after telling the son to repent, cleanse his ways 
and turn to God, the supposedly model father lights 
his meerschaum, sits down at the piano, and, by waft¬ 
ing a Brahms intermezzo to our nostrils instead of our 
ears, tries to fix his message in the minds of the 
audience. Mr. Kennedy’s descriptive phrase—“slop¬ 
ping with leers and whiskey”—indicates clearly 
enough his contempt for lust and liquor; but, after all, 
it is artificial and without force—in fact little more 
than a pipe-dream. 


PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 31 


It is a natural law that the arrival of every living 
and lasting thing in this world involves resistance, effort 
and suffering- The cotyledons must burst asunder the 
tough but protective seed-coat, and the tender sprout 
must force its way up through the impeding but nour¬ 
ishing soil. A mother must convulse with physical pain 
while her child is being delivered. A thought or mental 
product, which is destined to live, likewise subjects its 
parent to misery and struggle during its development 
and advent. One must suffer in order to be the bearer 
of living matter or the channel for living thought. To 
the degree that one tries to smother that suffering by 
artificial means instead of bearing it with fortitude and 
hope—to that degree is the health of the offspring 
impaired and the duration of its life shortened. The 
woman who is not brave enough to bear the throes of 
labor and who surrenders to the delightful oblivion of 
“twilight sleep” may be dooming her baby to a future 
of misery in order that she herself might escape a 
comparatively ephemeral pain; for the chemical, from 
whose effects her mature body speedily recovers, like¬ 
wise circulates through the fragile non-resisting system 
of the unborn child, prenatally drugging it, checking 
its growth and development and marring it with imper¬ 
fections. Physicians know why they prefer to use a 
minimum of the anaesthetic. It is best not to tamper 
too much with Nature, and it is alw;ays well to remem¬ 
ber that He who suffered most without relief for their 
benefaction had the greatest love for men. Let every 
artist take heed: if he succumbs to narcotics and 
stimulants in fighting the mental pangs which accom¬ 
pany opposition, ridicule, unpopularity, odium, chagrin, 
solitude and imaginary defeat, his child, if born at all, 
will be unhealthy and diseased, fated to only a momen¬ 
tary existence and unworthy even of his own affection. 


32 PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


It is likewise erroneous to believe that an artist must 
have lived the lives of his characters before he can 
portray them successfully. The genuine artist is 
always moral. Virtue, asserted Plato, knows both 
itself and vice, while vice knows neither. An intox¬ 
icated man could not act the role of a drunkard; 
neither must wine once have flowed through an author’s 
veins before he can describe the sensations of drunk¬ 
enness, or must he have wooed before he can write a 
romance, nor must he have glutted over a prostitute 
before he can visualize sexual debauchery, nor must 
he have been gored by Bull Durham before he can pen 
the hallucinations of a tobacco-fiend—not if he have a 
touch, a smattering (be it ever so little) of the innate 
unconsciousness, without which there can be no gen¬ 
uine art. An artist must have lived with men, but he 
need not in reality have lived their lives—the lives 
which pass in review through the intermingling realms 
of imagination and reminiscence in the solitude of his 
chamber. But art, as we usually meet with it, is 
produced by an artificial rather than an instinctive 
unconsciousness; it is mostly a transformation of drugs 
into words, colors and tones. 

But perhaps I am giving too much space to tobacco 
in its relation to art. Few boys are destined to become 
creative artists, but surely it should be our ardent hope 
that all of them shall acquire the faculty of thinking, 
which, to use the words of Emerson, is the only thing 
that makes us better than cow or cat. 


“The thinkers of the country are the tobacco 
chewers!” 

I was repelled—absolutely disgusted—when my 
eyes fell on this advertisement recently in one of our 


PRINCE ALBERT'S VELVET TUXEDO 33 


daily papers. I immediately recalled what I have 
often seen: a sallow, cheek distorted by a wad of that 
filth, the brown drivel leaking from the corners of the 
mouth and staining the beard, a stream of the juice 
squirted occasionally from the gluey lips—a thinker! 
Yes; a thinker whose thoughts are as sullied as his 
saliva. The remarkable statement, so the advertise¬ 
ment went on to say, was made by one of the greatest 
thinkers this country has ever produced. Luckily the 
great (?) thinker’s name was not appended to the 
great (?) thought he had contributed. 

Not only the great thinker but the average man at 
work over his desk is absurdly advised by the modern 
magazine to use tobacco to help him across his difficul¬ 
ties. “Chew it over with Piper Heidsick (Champagne 
Flavor) ,” says the Cosmopolitan , “and you’ll find the 
right solution to your problem.” And it was this same 
magazine which some time ago published Elbert Hub¬ 
bard’s articles condemning the use of the weed. 

The coming thinkers of the country are supposed 
to be the young men who are attending our colleges 
and universities. Certainly education, above all other 
activities, should deal with the cultivation of thought; 
its product should be something more than a human 
parrot. But the statement is as true as it is trite that 
there is no other class of men, considered as a whole, 
who think so little and on such petty and oftentimes 
low topics as do college undergraduates. It is due, I 
should say, in great part, to the omnipresent cigarette 
and the traditional pipe. There is no other place 
where vulgar stories are related with smoother elo¬ 
quence and heard with more absorbing eagerness than 
in a room filled with students and tobacco smoke. 
There is no other place where cigarette-smoking has 
degenerated (if that which is degenerate may degen- 


34 PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


erate) into a lust more vicious than that which char¬ 
acterizes it at our places of learning. There are scores 
of students who cannot study one page of a textbook 
before it has been thoroughly permeated with the 
exhalations from their nostrils and who pruriently 
await the close of each recitation to “roll one’* in the 
hall on the way out. 

Nor are the faculty immune. No small percentage 
of them are likewise dominated by the habit. Imme¬ 
diately after classes, they seek the seclusion of their 
private offices, close the doors on the “No Smoking” 
placards posted so hypocritically in the vestibules, and 
are soon throwing off volumes like the dragon in 
Siegfried. It is absurd even to think of reforming our 
undergraduates until we reform each and every man 
who instructs them. “I should very much dislike to 
send a young and impressionable son for instruction in 
any subject to any teacher who used cigarettes,” 
writes a well-known specialist on the drug habit, and 
then reveals how “a clean father who rears a clean 
son is under the tragic necessity of sending him to be a 
student in a dirty college for the simple reason that 
there are no clean ones.” 

But aside from the danger of this dirty contact 
with the younger student, to me there is nothing more 
inconsistent than a professor working over his researches 
at the same time that he is devouring a cigarette; it 
must be a queer sort of enlightenment that springs from 
a brain steeped in nicotine. It is easy to understand 
why so many of the investigations made by college 
professors and instructors are scoffed at as being trivial 
and useless; the poor quality may be accounted for in 
much the same way as the poor scholarship of the 
cigarette-bound student. 

It is high time that we come to a definite under- 


PRINCE ALBERT »S VELVET TUXEDO 35 


standing on just what is meant by genuine thought. 
It is very essential that the purer messages, which come 
quite naturally through healthy minds, be differentiated 
from the pompous theories and the depraved fancies 
of diseased brains whose strings are pulled by the 
siren Fatima. 

However, it is not only in serious thought but also 
in the superficial chatter at ordinary social gatherings 
where it is becoming the general opinion that external 
material agents are needed for clarity and cleverness 
of utterance. “An occasional sip serves merely as a 
comma or semicolon in the talk,*’ wrote a contributor 
to the Unpopular Review who so idiotically defends 
the sale of liquor because the hospitality of English 
bar-maids is such a godsend to the lonely traveler. And 
to quote again from the Cosmopolitan: “An alert¬ 
looking young man in a lively argument likes to punc¬ 
tuate a crisp sentence with a puff of Bull Durham.’’ 
It would seem that the oral pauses that make for 
eloquence can be acquired only through drinking and 
smoking. 

And now aside from a social standpoint: The 
claim that tobacco brings solace to the overworked 
business man or to the employee or professional in any 
line of work will not be accepted here in defense of 
its use. How long will it take men to open their eyes 
to the fact that the so-called weaker sex manage to re¬ 
cover not only from work but from drudgery without 
resorting to its use! After all, to be under a stupor 
is not to be at rest either physically or mentally; it is 
merely the inertia which accompanies the deterioration 
of vital tissue. This consequent inertia is boastfully 
admitted by Prince Albert—“a tobacco that tips you 
to dig—deep—into—the—cushions and p-p-p-puff 


36 PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


away in the swellest—swim—of—smoke-sunshine that 
ever did flow in your direction.** Could one find 
words more indicative of a flabby, medusiform mind? 
And yet this same drivel seeps through every P. A. 
advertisement and is always accompanied by a mole- 
featured visionless “face** which corresponds identi¬ 
cally with this verbal expression of genuine degeneracy. 
Rest is the building-up and not the tearing-down of 
organism. It does not mean stagnation, but rather a 
change in the nature of one’s activity, a change in 
environment, a change in atmosphere, a long deep 
breath of fresh, wholesome air, rich in ozone—not two 
lungs full of the poisonous fumes which have been 
sucked through that cesspool of tobacco and spittle: 
the stem of a “ripe“ meerschaum pipe. 


The sum-total of injuries due to tobacco in general 
may be gathered by reading all the condemning state¬ 
ments which each particular brand, in its own defense, 
makes against all the others. The two advertisements 
following were clipped from the Literary) Digest , the 
parentheses being mine: 

(1) Ever feel dizzy after a smoke (a smoke like 
Robert Burns for example?) You’d better switch to 
Girards. That’s the way to take the whirl out of your 
wits, straighten out your thinker, and bring back the 
clear-headed efficiency you need in business life today. 
Girards never get on your nerves, never affect your 
heart or your digestion, never interfere with your health 
(like Robert Burns do). Switch to Girards! If your 
heart starts acting like this, jump-jump-flutter-flop, 
jump-jump-flutter-flop—Switch to Girards (from 
Robert Burns). 

(2) “You smoke too much,” my better half pro- 


Rlif \\n fA r% 9 minp cnnlzn l'ncf Iaa 1 of a {av T 


PRINCE ALBERT'S VELVET TUXEDO 37 


made a change the week before (from Girards). “The 
trouble was —not is,*’ I made reply. “True, my cigars 
have been too strong. But now, my dear. I’ve turned 
my back on smoking of that kind and taken up mild 
Robert Burns instead. No more for me, those harsh 
cigars (Girards) that storm my thoughts and nerves 
and breed regret. 

In the midst of all this switching, the following 
advertisement is refreshing and convincing: “Before 
breakfast when the senses are sharpened by a good 
night’s rest—this is obviously a good time to find out 
why nobody changes from Rameses.*’ Rameses here 
admits that “a good night’s rest’* is the only thing 
“which straightens out your thinker*’—the thinker 
which is kinked by Rameses, Prince Albert, King 
George—and Lillian Russell alike. Hence, why 
change from Rameses, I admire this openness. It 
is praiseworthy compared to the advertisements of Pall 
Mall—“A Shilling in London, a Quarter Here’’— 
printed on a gold background and showing a boxed 
hand the stained fingers of which are cleverly concealed 
by an immaculate white kid glove. 

It is a very common fault wth children to place 
anything they find, clean or unclean, into their mouths. 
It is a habit which a girl soon outgrows, but which 
usually leaves its influence on some men throughout 
life. I recall a tobacco-can which was always a con¬ 
spicuous ornament on the large table about which my 
colleagues used to assemble at our departmental fac¬ 
ulty meetings. It was a sort of contribution box, in 
which all those who smoked during the session used 
to deposit their cigarette-butts. The odor in that can 
was similar to that which would have been there if 
something had died in it and been left indefinitely as 


38 PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


nourishment for maggots. I feel fairly safe in assert¬ 
ing that no baby could have crawled near enough to 
that can and still survived to place the contents in its 
mouth. And yet the odor was nothing more than a 
concentration of the “aroma” which constantly 
emanates from the body of a heavy smoker. 

What a blessing are single beds! 

It has recently been estimated that the amount we 
spend annually on tobacco is fully three times the sum 
which we spend on our common school system, three 
times the entire cost of the Panama Canal, twice the 
amount spent by the whole country on railroad travel 
and twice the amount it costs to maintain the govern¬ 
ment. In figures it looks something like $1,200,000,- 
000. But it is not my object to deal with statistics 
and comparisons. I do not propose to make you gasp 
at the enormity of the expenditure, which is probably 
mild compared to that which is squandered on other 
luxuries. But what I wish to do is to arouse your 
disgust—your deepest disgust—at the gruesomeness of 
the fact that something like six hundred million pounds 
of this “dope” are produced and consumed annually 
in the United States. 

It is pleasing and encouraging to know that the 
women are but slightly responsible in placing this blot 
on the escutcheon—a blot which is more than twice as 
large as that of any other nation- It makes me feel 
that each woman in the land deserves a new bonnet 
every Easter; it is a far better way in which to invest 
the above sum. And it makes me think that woman’s 
suffrage is not so idiotic a movement as some of us 
were wont to believe. It is consoling to know that man 
merely fertilizes the human ovule and that the embryo, 
during its growth and development, receives nourish- 


PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 39 


ment from a body which is not permeated with the 
fumes of the weed that smoulders on the lips of our 
male inhabitants. Motherhood is the most noble mis¬ 
sion of woman. It should be her first pleasure and 
duty to bear and rear the citizens of the future; but if 
they, after all she has suffered and labored for them, 
are not men enough to refrain from the habits and 
bribes which render them unfit for their responsibilities, 
which she in consequence must asume in addition to her 
own—then it is little wonder that she has revolted and 
prefers to become a citizen herself rather than merely 
breed men who become unfit for such. 

“All the vim, energy and enthusiasm we put into 
the playing of The Stars And Stripes Forever we find 
in the steady use of Tuxedo.” This statement, pub¬ 
lished in one of our most widely read weeklies, was 
signed by John Philip Sousa and the sixty-six members 
of his famous band. 

Such information came to me rather painfully. I 
had always hoped it was Mr. Sousa’s patriotism and 
his love for the natural spirit of Liberty that had 
inspired both the writing and the rendition of the 
March King’s masterpiece- Now that I have learned 
authentically (for I do not believe Mr. Sousa would 
stoop so low as to be bribed) the artificial stimulus 
behind the work which so hypocritically bellows out, 
with sham majesty, the significance of America, I 
regret to say, that in my estimation, the composition 
has sunk into that trough which will be the ultimate 
grave of every Godless production that is little more 
than brass and noise. 

I repeat it, for the sake of emphasis, that nothing 
shall warp my mind from the belief that the only genu¬ 
ine art is that which flows spontaneously without arti- 


40 PRINCE ALBERT'S VELVET TUXEDO 


ficial stimulation. Give me, at all times, the warble of 
a thrush, perched on a sunlit magnolia tree, drunk with 
the balmy fragrance of its blossoms and in tempo with 
the gracefully swaying branches—I prefer it to all the 
symphonies which have leaked out of smoked or soaked 
brains to be scrawled sloppily over dirty manuscript 
paper by the fumbling yellow-nailed fingers of a freak. 

I find some consolation, however, in thinking—in 
fact knowing—that at least some of Mr. Sousa’s 
musicians were bribed, even though he was not. A 
man who plays with a band is, almost proverbially, a 
poor wanderer with a conscience so weak that it under¬ 
goes no severe strain when he signs a smooth falsehood 
to enhance his meagre income. Then, too, many musi¬ 
cians are hyphenated Americans, and it is not improb¬ 
able that they had to be launched into an artificial 
unconsciousness before they could render, at the time 
of the War and with seeming enthusiasm, a selection 
with the significance supposedly characteristic of this 
one. 

But the artificial unconsciousness which tobacco 
produces (however heartlessly I have condemned it 
with reference to creative art) has, however, a worthy 
use in connection with destructive science when the 
latter seems unavoidable as it did in the World-War; 
and this use is the one not of controlling and calming 
the emotions of the disloyal citizen but of comforting 
the fighter on the field. And yet it disturbed many of 
us when the Russian Symphony Orchestra gave con¬ 
certs for the benefit of the Soldier’s Tobacco Fund 
and when young women, in recent Liberty Loan 
Parades, carried huge American flags horizontally to 
receive the coins and banknotes which were tossed upon 
them for the same purpose. We could not see the 


PBINCE ALBEET’S VELVET TUXEDO 41 


wisdom of our government when it considered the sale 
of liquor to soldiers seditious and the gift of smokes 
patriotic; for we rightly knew there had been no book 
written condemning the use of alcohol which had not 
also dwelt on the injurious effects of nicotine. 

Liquor uninstinctively inflames a man to fight—to 
fight for any cause whatever, or, as is more often the 
case, for no cause at all. The United States, however, 
did not care to have its fighters blindly and artificially 
inflamed by spirits but naturally inflamed by The Spirit 
of World-Freedom. Tobacco, on the other hand, does 
not excite the mind but soothes and temporarily relieves 
mental depression. Those of us who read Barbusse 
did not object to having tobacco sent to the front in 
large quantities for this purpose. For the “jump- 
jump-flutter-flop” produced by the narcotic itself must 
have been insignificant compared to the derangements 
which resulted from the horrors of war, and the so- 
called aroma of the weed must indeed have been 
fragrance against the deadly stench of decaying flesh. 
I believe that few men could have borne this strain 
without having resorted to some sedative, and it was 
well that the lesser of two evils was employed to 
counteract the stulifying sensations of the greater. Fur¬ 
thermore, whatever ill effects the tobacco may have 
had on the soldier’s system, they were trivial in com¬ 
parison with the injuries, instantly fatal in many cases, 
due to shrapnel and the bayonet. 

But, at the same time, it was asinine to say that 
“tobacco won the war”—just as asinine as to claim 
that it is the vim, energy and enthusiasm behind the 
playing of The Stars And Stripes Forever. The War 
was not won by the things which American soldiers 
had in common with the German, but by the discrimi¬ 
nating Spirit to which I have referred above. Tobacco 


42 PRINCE ALBERT'S VELVET TUXEDO 


can no more be the force that gives birth to an era of 
world-freedom than the anaesthetic can be the force 
that gives birth to a child. And it behooved every 
loyal American to resent forcibly the use of posters 
on which the supply wagon of the army was repre¬ 
sented as a huge box of Helmar cigarettes on wheels, 
or on which Murads made the distorted and disgraceful 
use of our sacred tribute to George Washington: 
“First in peace, first in war, and first in the mouths of 
our countrymen!** This was not patriotism, but the 
prostitution of it for the sake of profiteering. 

Tobacco undeniably had its place in war, but its 
place was undeniably not first. Perhaps Champ Clark 
came nearer to giving it its proper rank when he said: 
“With thousands of American soldiers going to France 
to lay down their lives, if need be, I think the least the 
stay-at-homes can do is to keep them supplied with 
Tobacco.’’ (The italics are mine.) 

As to Tobacco’s place in times of peace—the peace 
which will follow this War—it will eventually have 
no place at all. During the War I read the following 
sign in a street car: “No more ‘makings’ for Civilians! 
The government request the entire output of Bull 
Durham for Soldiers and Sailors!’’ I am inclined to 
think there was something prophetic about this sign, 
although I do not usually believe in them. It is encour¬ 
aging, however, to know that civilians can find their 
“makings’’ in something other than tobacco, if it be 
in nothing other than the very abstinence from its use. 
To be sure, struggles—and great struggles, too—do 
not disappear in times of peace, but they are infinitely 
less intensive and extensive, and the normal man can 
always meet them without the use of drugs—in fact, 
it is this very independence that proves him a man. 

The possibility of another world war is no argument 


PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 43 


that our country should, in the meanwhile, continue the 
manufacture of tobacco and that our boys should learn 
how to smoke, any more than it is an argument that 
we should continue making munitions and that they 
should continue learning and practicing how to shoot. 
The cost of our sudden preparation for hostilities would 
probably seem not so enormous in comparison with that 
of financing a permanent nation-wide system of military 
drill. The United States proved that it could prepare 
successfully on short notice. It was not necessary to 
have had militarism implanted in the minds of our 
youth in order to win a war; it was that which lost a 
war. Furthermore, the fact that West Point now has 
a shortage of more than five hundred cadets whereas 
the enrollment at many purely educational institutions 
has increased by that number and more, reveals that 
with the War at an end, the temporal military regime 
of this successful nation, if it has not been already 
forgotten, is at least recalled with aversion. And per¬ 
haps the same is or soon will be true of the four hun¬ 
dred and twenty-five million cigarettes which were 
consumed monthly by the American Army in France. 

Prohibition for alcohol has rightly come during , 
while prohibition for tobacco must inevitably come 
after , the War—for this was a war to end wars and 
all their accompanying and seemingly necessary evils. 

President Wilson has truly said that nothing can 
be wisely done for which the thought, and a good deal 
more than the thought, of the country, its sentiment and 
its purpose, have not been prepared. It is folly to give 
the entire credit for a dry nation to the War alone. 
Had it not been for the unflagging efforts of orators 
and writers and all those who by their thoughts and 
actions advocated temperence in the years preceding 


44 PRINCE ALBERT'S VELVET TUXEDO 


the War, prohibition could not have been attained 
spasmodically through a conflict even ten times more 
bloody than the past one—if such be conceivable. 

It is my prophecy, however, that tobacco will not 
ultimately demand gunpowder and bloodshed to blow 
and wash it from our midst. The world will have had 
enough of slaughter, and it will gladly and dispas¬ 
sionately prefer mental to physical and material force. 
Mind will once more have the ascendancy. Therefore 
we must appeal primarily not to the unlettered I. W. 
W. who spit on their dirty hands, but to the cultured 
gentlemen who expectorate into nickle-plated cuspi¬ 
dors. It rests with the undergraduates and graduates 
of our schools and colleges and universities to take 
the initiatve in setting up an example which other men 
may follow—for who but the educators and the edu¬ 
cated were placed on this earth for such a purpose! 
And by educators I mean not only those who are 
confined to our places of learning, but also those who 
have gone forth—in particular the heads of large busi¬ 
ness concerns and the editors and managers of our 
magazines and daily papers. 

Manufacturers have forsaken the war-winning feat¬ 
ure in tobacco advertisements and our daily papers are 
now running huge cuts of the familiar scenes on the 
campus at Yale, Harvard, Prnceton and other colleges 
and proclaiming the popularity of Fatima Cigarettes 
at these institutions; and, fortunately, they go still 
farther to claim that this popularity persists among the 
alumni as indicated by the sales at the famous graduate 
clubs of these universities in New York City and else¬ 
where. Little do they realize that they are opening 
the eyes of the public and of college men in particular 
to the monstrous growth of a gigantic evil. Little do 
they realize that they are inflaming leaders among col- 


PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TTJXEDO 45 


lege men all over the country to rise up in rebellion 
against this menace to educaton. Little do they real¬ 
ize that they are inciting a truly academic war in which 
the only weapon shall be brain-power, clear and clean, 
minus the mud and the blood and the sputum of the 
trenches. 

I have shown how needlessly—even how repug¬ 
nantly—the tobacco habit is acquired, and I have 
endeavored to point out the forces whch are respon¬ 
sible for its development and its spread. These forces 
can be and must be gradually weakened and ultimately 
annihilated. 

A man is born with a desire for food. This desire 
cannot be suppressed without immediately affecting 
his health and eventually effecting premature death. 
Later in life comes the desire for pure sexual inter¬ 
course. It is just as natural a desire as the desire for 
food, and its moderate gratification likewise improves 
his health and his ability. But unlike the desire for 
food, it can be suppressed without seriously affecting 
his health, although it would prevent the birth of other 
men and consequently, if suppressed in general, effect 
the dying-off of the entire race. 

Tobacco, fortunately, is not a food, however ardent¬ 
ly Lucky Strike tries to make us believe so, by saying: 
“It’s toasted!”—and by advertising it beside tempt¬ 
ing dishes of cooked eggs and meat. The appetite or 
desire for tobacco in not innate but acquired at a 
man’s own volition. The desire is, in a way, the 
exact opposite of the desires for food and coition: for 
it can be suppressed without affecting the health or 
effecting the death of either the man or the offspring, 
whereas the indulgence in its gratification may ruin not 
only the man himself but his posterity as well. 


40 PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


The forces which bring about the desire for smok¬ 
ing are unessential and entirely external, and for that 
reason can be completely annihilated—not in the wink 
of an eye, but with years of patient application. The 
abolition of the White Slave Traffic (a business 
founded on the impure gratification of an innate desire, 
resistance to which is weakened by the acquired desires 
for material stimulants and narcotics) was, for seem¬ 
ingly sound logic, claimed by many and is still con¬ 
sidered by some as impossible, despite the marvelous 
efforts and results which had already been made 
and accomplished by our indefatigable social workers 
before it was well demonstrated by the American 
Expeditionary Forces that even in war-time, when the 
sexual strain is immense, prostitution is not a necessary 
evil which should be “regulated” but an unnecessary 
dissipation which can be dispensed with if replaced 
by proper recreation. The abolition of both the tobac¬ 
co and the liquor trades is an infinitely more hopeful 
undertaking, which if successful will eventually make 
the disappearance of commercialized vice complete 
and final. 

Tobacco, Alcohol and Prostitution are all prob¬ 
lems of demand and supply, the demand in the case of 
the latter being that of a perverted creative desire. In 
the cases of the two former the demand is not creative 
(although falsely believed so in art) but created — 
created, as I have already shown, by advertising and 
by the example set by others; and these are the exter¬ 
nal forces that our educators and college men must 
take in hand and weaken in preparation for legal and 
final action. 

There are some reformers who believe that the best 
way to eradicate a social evil is to disregard entirely 


PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 47 


those who are under its grip and to make appeals only 
to the uninitiated. They console themselves by knowing 
that the older victims will finally die and by believing 
that their habits will die with them, leaving the next 
generation not only free from the evil but entirely 
oblivious of it. Even though such a theory were prac¬ 
ticable, it reveals an attitude toward the “sinner” 
which is anything but Christian. But it is as imprac¬ 
ticable as it is inconsiderate. 

When I attended High School, the anti-cigarette 
leagues were very busy organizations. They were 
endeavoring, at that time, to persuade those boys as 
yet unacquainted with the use of tobacco, to sign 
pledges to the effect that they would never smoke. The 
leagues were a great success—if success can be meas¬ 
ured by the enormous number of pledges signed. But 
a few years ago the Philadelphia Ledger published the 
report that the number of cigarettes consumed annually 
in this country had leaped from three billions to twelve 
billions between 1903 and 1912; and it was in 1903 
that I graduated from High School. 

After all, what force has a dead and buried, black 
and white pledge in the presence of a temptation glar¬ 
ing in vivid colors across the cover of the most popular 
magazine on the library table or flaming from the roof 
of the highest sky-scraper or (and this above all) 
fuming continually on father’s or big brother’s very 
lips? 

The reformer’s first step should be not in the direc¬ 
tion of the uninitiated and not in the direction of the 
manufacturer, but toward the users of tobacco —not 
toward our grandfathers so much as our fathers and 
brothers, who, in addition to having a greater influence 
over the young, still have a chance to make over their 


48 PRINCE ALBERT'S VELVET TUXEDO 


own careers. The manufacturer knows that the sale 
of his article depends on advertising—both the adver¬ 
tising in magazines and on billboards and (what is 
most profitable and least expensive) the “talk” of those 
who have used and been pleased by it. Indeed, as 
I have pointed out, the best printed or painted adver¬ 
tisement is the personal endorsement itself of some well- 
known user. 

The reformer must approach the user with two 
requests: first, he must ask him not to encourage others: 
second, he must ask him to try hard to discourage 
himself in the use of the drug. 

Treating the men around a table to cigars is just 
as prevalent a social custom as was treating them to 
a drink. Doing away with the saloon will not do 
away with the custom of treating; for the have-a-smoke 
spirit was and is permitted in homes and at social 
gatherings where the take-a-drink spirit was absolutely 
debarred. And yet the same principle to which so 
much drunkenness was attributable underlies both. 

However, treating a man to a cigar is not always 
an expresson of sociability, and it probably does far 
more harm when it is used to bribe a man’s social infer¬ 
ior into doing a “favor” which invaribly has more or 
less unfairness and dishonor connected with it. Doing 
away with the custom of treating, as well as the custom 
of tipping, will make for a better world, not only men¬ 
tally and physically but also morally and politically. 

The problem of getting a man to give up the pleas¬ 
ure he finds in his own smoking is a more personal 
and difficult one, for with many it is entirely a soli¬ 
tary pleasure. He is likely to tell you that, whatever 
ravages tobacco has wrought on others, he has been 
able to use it regularly without noticeable injury or 
lassitude. This may be true enough, but his iron con- 


PEINCE ALBEET’S VELVET TUXEDO 49 


stitution is by no means common, and when he sets him¬ 
self up as an example where tobacco has done no 
harm, he is, although involuntarily and even unawares, 
luring weak-minded and weak-bodied boys into a com¬ 
bat which soon exhausts and reduces them to frail 
ghosts of men. No man is better fit to lead a reform 
than he who can grapple successfully with the ele¬ 
ments which enslave others. When the moderate and 
healthy man, who loves his cigar, abandons it altruisti¬ 
cally because it emasculates his brother, then may we 
begin to look for an amelioration. “Where there is 
progress, it is the result of a more and more complete 
sacrifice of the individual to the general interest.” 

But I am not so ready to admit that these exceptional 
smokers are in such good health as they themselves are 
prone to believe. It is a well-established fact that a 
person may become so accustomed to even the most 
obnoxious habit that he can no more be “well” and 
happy without it than he could without his meals. 
Thus you sometimes hear these smokers say that the 
only time they have neither the desire nor the ability 
to smoke is during illness. Is not this an abnormal 
rather than a healthy state of existence? It is usually 
during illness that the generally healthy man does 
resort to drugs, and it would seem that the man who 
smokes regularly is constantly sick like the man who 
needed his daily nip! 

It is doubtful if the majority of men who manage 
the publication of our newspapers and magazines are 
addicted to the use of tobacco; the very excellence of 
the printing in some of them—in particular, of some 
tobacco “ads”—is indicative of abstinence. It is still 
more doubtful if such men sanction the use of tobacco 
by others. What a great thing it would be for their 


50 PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


country were they to obey the dictates of their own 
conscience instead of allowing their passion for capital 
to lead them about by the nose! Collier s who, I 
believe, styles herself The National Weekly, could 
have refused a certain manufacturer the middle double 
page of a recent issue without going into bankruptcy, 
and in doing so would have taken a big step toward 
helping to prevent the spread of a greater harm to the 
nation than could be measured by the dollars and 
cents which ^he would not have lost but simply not 
have “gained.” 

But there is a class of publication which must and 
will lead all others in this weeding-out process. I 
mean the college papers—in particular, the papers 
of my own Alma Mater with which I am the more 
familiar. The space given to Murad Cigarettes in the 
Yale News during the past years reflects anything but 
credit on its staff and on the university itself. And it 
was not only the size of the “ads” but the style: white 
lettering on a black background (the only conspicuous 
feature of the whole paper) figures that seemed almost 
life-size, sentiment that placed the attachment to one’s 
“smokes” above the friendship with one’s classmates, 
and such doggerel as the following: “They’re like 
meeting your best girl face to face!” All this from 
one of the supposedly foremost “educational” institu¬ 
tions in America! I am not claiming that such “ads” 
did not appear in the papers of other colleges—in 
particular, in those whose standing, financial and other¬ 
wise, is so low that the cost of publication must be 
maintained exclusively by the large sums paid for such 
cheap insertions. 

Nor is the Yale Alumni Weekly much better in 
this respect. Note the following full page of pictur¬ 
esque nonsense: “Tonight between supper-time and 


PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 51 


bed-time the men of this country will light 1,080,000 
Fatimas. This is Fatima’s nightly average. In every 
village and city, from cross-roads to metropolis, the 
glowing ends of Fatima Cigarettes will signal ‘Comfort’ 
to smokers all over the land. Fatimas are comfort¬ 
able to the throat and tongue; and they leave you feel¬ 
ing ‘fit’ and clear-headed at the end of a long Fatima 
day that leads into a fragrant Fatima evening. It’s 
the common-sense ‘Comfort’ of their delicate Turkish 
blend that has made Fatimas known as a sensible cigar¬ 
ette. To-night—try them! 20 for 15 cents.” Read 
this *‘ad” again, for it really contains the very incen¬ 
tive that a reformer needs. There are some startling 
and enlightening facts mingled in with all the fluent 
falsehoods. Could this be the purpose of the Yale 
Alumni Weekly in bringing it to the attention of Yale 
graduates? 

And now—not a final word to the educators who 
create the demand (for there can be no final word to 
them) but a word to the educators who manufacture 
the supply, for I know that many of them are college 
men. Has not the time come when men should con¬ 
duct their business with their hearts as well as their 
heads? Would it not be well if the money-making 
schemes thought out by shrewd merchants were first 
submitted to the heart for approval before they were 
permitted to go into effect? Should not the aim of 
trade include service to one’s fellowmen as well as 
personal profits? Would it not be nobler to feel that 
our fortunes are our reward for regenerating man 
rather than to know that our gains depend on his degra¬ 
dation? Are you going into business, young fellow: 
Stop and reflect! Will the trade you propose to enter 
be beneficial to mankind? Will the article you sell 


52 PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 


bring misery and sorrow to some or health and happi¬ 
ness to each and all of your customers? And you 
older men who have already reaped large incomes 
from the manufacture of materials which wreck human 
lives and homes—have you not acquired enough to 
live simply and in comfort for the rest of your days? 
Why not let your establishment contract rather than 
expand over more territory? Why lure more men into 
the making and use of your harmful and unessential 
product? 

Prohibition Eventually! Let that be our slogan! 
A general world-wide prohibition—the ultimate eman¬ 
cipation of all nations not only from the manufacture 
and use of munitions but from the manufacture and use 
of each and every product whch dwarfs and destroys 
the development of the human mind and body. The 
great movement will not be without its slackers. There 
will be those who will prefer to die in bondage rather 
than forsake their domineering and ruthless masters. 
Let them continue to abide under the dominion of 
drugs and drivers as did the slaves before the Great 
Civil War. But after this, The Greatest of All Wars, 
in that it has planted the seed whose fruit will free 
not only the colored race, but all the races from all 
forms of serfdom, there will come a majority—an over¬ 
whelming majority—whose thoughts have not been 
poisoned by autocracy and lust, whose eyes have not 
been dulled by alcohol and whose vision has not been 
dimmed by smoke, who will understand and see clearly 
that a free world means the personal freedom of each 
and every individual from each and every force which 
impairs genuine health, joy and progress. For the 
welfare of themselves and of future generations they 
will denounce each and every folly that had become 


PRINCE ALBERT’S VELVET TUXEDO 53 


a seeming essential to our ancestors; they will cast out 
each and every idol and blunder and will take with 
defiance each and every step which makes for a 
cleaner, nobler, stronger mankind and for a peace 
supreme—a peace in which human energy unadulter¬ 
ated shall have a righteous outlet and application, not 
a peace like the smoker’s solace which is little more 
than the gradual corrosion and decay of a God-given 
constitution. 












The Passing of Brother Greek 




























































































































































































































































































. 








. 






























































































































. 






























































The Passing of Brother Greek 


“Unfortunately, the large majority of those who 
have written about fraternities, more especially those 
who have written against them, have had very little 
first hand information. What they say ought not to 
be given too much weight in discussing fraternities.” 
These statements occur in the very first paragraph of 
The Fraternity and the Undergraduate —a book by 
Thomas Arkle Clark, Dean of Men, University of 
Illinois. In the second paragraph the Dean emphasizes 
this accusation of “ignorance” against the critics of 
the fraternities and, in addition, charges them with 
“jealousy.” 

I happen to be one of those “who have written about 
fraternities, more especially against them.” That the 
information I have published is “first hand” ought to 
be evident from the fact that I held the position of 
proctor in a fraternity dormitory for three years; that 
the information is “very little” naturally follows from 
the fact that I was a proctor—not a spy. Fraternity 
men make no particular effort to reveal their secrets to 
an outsider; and even if a non-inquisitive outsider, 
with no intention of discovering these secrets, lives in 
their midst, the chances are that he will remain in igno¬ 
rance as to the politics of the group. However, unless 
he is deaf and blind or so deeply buried in research 


58 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


that he hears and sees nothing else (and such traits are 
rarely sought for in a proctor), he cannot help but 
acquire involuntarily a superficial knowledge of some 
of the habits of the Greeks. 

Dean Clark’s charge of “ignorance,” in my case at 
least, was certainly true—until I had read his book. 
As to his charge of “jealousy,” I must say that if I 
was tainted with it at the time, I have certainly been 
purified by learning authentically from him the many 
defects and shortcomings which characterize frater¬ 
nity men. From my own observatons I have often dis¬ 
covered splendid and enviable traits in some fraternity 
men as individuals, but I have concluded that my own 
observations “ought not to be given too much weight” 
in discussing fraternity men as groups. I am, in fact, 
going to discard my own observations and base this 
article on the group-characteristics as revealed by Dean 
Clark and other Graduate Greeks. The incentive for 
writing this article was indeed found in Dean Clark’s 
own statement: “If men who are waging an active 
war against fraternities had usually been active mem¬ 
bers of these organizations and acquainted with the 
purposes and the real life of fraternity men, they could 
make a considerably stronger case.” It is the “con¬ 
siderably stronger case” that I should like to make, 
but by playing the part of a war-correspondent rather 
than that of a warrior—by boiling down and re-pre¬ 
senting what I believe to be the more decisive points in 
the Dean’s book. I shall, however, use quotation 
marks freely, although I shall probably omit many 
statements which he would prefer to have quoted 
instead. But any one who cares to read the entire 
book can discover for himself the aid and comfort 
which is given to the enemy. I am merely interpreting 
the book to reveal to Dean Clark and to others the 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 59 


strength and excellence of his case against the Greeks. 

Dean Clark was not only a fraternity man when an 
undergraduate but is at present Worthy Grand Chief 
of his chapter; and he probably knows as much about 
“the purposes and the real life” of any Greek-letter 
organization as he does about Alpha Tau Omega, for 
as Dean of Men at the University of Illinois, which 
reeks with Greeks, he comes in contact with represen¬ 
tatives of almost every fraternity in the country. No 
one is better versed in fraternity problems than he, and 
no one has thrown more light on the situation. He is the 
guiding star in this war of Greek against Greek, but 
he is surrounded by several lesser planets whose re¬ 
flected light has illuminated the pages of Banta's 
Green Exchange for several years, and from which I 
shall quote as freely as from his books— The Fraternity 
and the Undergraduate and The Fraternity and the 
College. 

The case of Dean Clark is an interesting study in 
Psychology. As Dean of Men, an enormous amount 
of the evil in fraternity life has been brought to his 
attention for rectification. The conspiracy of silence 
which was earlier instilled in him as an undergraduate 
Greek (and which in regard to immorality has always 
been as characteristic of college administration as it has 
of fraternity politics) has, in an effort to make it seem 
unreal, forced this information back into what the 
modern psychologist calls the unconscious mind, al¬ 
though it seems to me that the most effective way to 
make us conscious of an evil is that of allowing the 
mind to be constantly occupied with the effort of mak¬ 
ing it seem non-extant. But the world eventually 
demands an admission of the facts, and, paradoxical 
as it may seem, there is no better way to bring about 


60 THE PASSING OF BEOTHEE GEEEK 


an expose than through the culmination and ever-in- 
creasing pressure due to concealment. Dean Clark has 
exploded; and his expose of fraternity life is as whole¬ 
some a thing as has shocked the ears of the academic 
world in a long time. Of course, his “loyalty to his 
frat” at times causes him to hold back and leads him 
to make numerous absurd contradictions, but the truth 
invariably burns through the veil under which he tries 
to diminish its vividness. He reiterates constantly that 
fraternities have the highest ideals of manhood existent 
anywhere in the country and then invariably goes on 
to show that they seldom live up to them—in fact 
violate them one and all. 

To each of these ideals and to its violation in the 
Dean’s own words, I shall devote a section of this 
article. 

“The fraternity sets before its members, also, cer¬ 
tain standards of manners, the effects of whch can be 
seen everywhere. The fraternity man who is crude, 
or coarse, or impolite, or ill-trained has some one to 
correct him, has some one usually to set a good 
example before him. The man outside must work 
these things out for himself, as he very frequently does, 
or remains as he is.” Then, in the following chapter 
on Fraternity Home Life, the Dean reveals these “cer¬ 
tain standards of manners” as follows: “I have gone 
to fraternity houses to dinner only to find that the 
man who had invited me was dining somewhere else; 
I have been at other houses where only a small percen¬ 
tage of the members even took the trouble to speak to 
me. I have been at a number of fraternity parties 
within the last few years where few if any of the fresh¬ 
men even spoke to the invited guests, and very fre¬ 
quently even the upperclassmen ignored them.” He 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 61 


goes on to relate some “extreme examples” of the 
“callowness and impoliteness” of fraternity men, add¬ 
ing in the same breath that he meets “similar situations 
every week” which leads one to think that they are not 
so “extreme” as the Dean would have us believe. 

“The boy who at home has run the household, and 
the only child who has never had to yield his rights or 
his playthings to any one, the sensitive or the selfish 
fellow, will be taught a good many things before he 
has been in a fraternity long.” 

“Fraternity men are too likely to consider property 
of any brother common property, and the freshman 
who finds his bureau drawers rifled and his favorite 
studs in another man’s shirts has at once something to 
learn when he moves into a fraternity house.” 

These quotations are widely separated in Dean 
Clark’s book, but when printed side by side, they give 
food for thought. One naturally asks one’s self which 
is the greater evil: the orderly selfishness of a non-fra¬ 
ternity man or the disorderly dependence of Brother 
Greek, It may, in the eyes of some, be a vice to have 
a place for everything and to have everything in its 
place ready for one’s own selfish use; but is it a virtue 
to make unselfish sacrifices and lend freely to the other 
fellow when it transforms him into a reckless and 
slovenly parasite? 

“The fact that in some institutions proportionately 
more fraternity men than others are caught in dishonest 
acts and in financial irregularities is not because frater¬ 
nity men are less clever or more carefully watched than 
other men, but because they have been careless in living 
up to their ideals.” 

“I have in mind a group of young fraternity men 


62 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


who were taking an examination. The time was short, 
the last question was difficult, and all were confused. 
An upperclassman near the close of the hour, glancing 
at the paper of his neighbor, read what he supposed 
to be a correct answer to the question. Without think¬ 
ing, he wrote it down and whispered the solution to 
his needy brother.” 

‘‘I recall a letter written by a member of a chapter 
with which I was acquainted which began ‘After 
closing a remarkably successful college year,* and 
continued with a page of similar enthusiasm. The 
‘remarkably successful year’ for them had in reality 
been full of disaster. The commissary through mis¬ 
management had left the fraternity nearly a $ 1,000 in 
debt, one of their prominent upperclassmen had been 
dismissed for cribbing, the highest officer of the frater¬ 
nity had neglected his duty throughout his entire term 
of office, and the freshmen had been allowed to run 
wild so that they had brought down the scholastic 
standing of the organization to the bottom of the 
fraternity list; and yet it had been a ‘remarkably suc¬ 
cessful college year.”* 

‘‘The scholarship average of our fraternities last 
semester was as high as the average of men living out¬ 
side of these organizations,” says Dean Clark; but 
he is either wrong or admitting that the scholarship 
standard at the Unversity of Illinois is generally low 
everywhere. The following statements of the Dean 
in Bania's Creek Exchange will help us to decide: 
‘‘Seventy-five per cent of the men, as I see them now, 
in the active chapter houses of the fraternities, are 
indifferent to the real purposes of the fraternities or 
ignorant of them. They have little interest in books 
or study. They are loafers. A young man was telling 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 63 


me only yesterday that in his organization, which is 
considered one of the best on the campus, an upper¬ 
classman who likes to read or who is regular at his 
studies is thought a joke.” He goes on to tell how the 
upperclassmen ‘‘send the freshmen upstairs to work on 
their books and then put on their overcoats and start 
out for the vaudeville show or the pool room.” He 
says elsewhere that ‘‘our records for some time past 
have shown that the freshmen living in fraternity houses 
have a higher standard than those who live outside of 
those houses.” He does not seem to realize that these 
freshmen are merely trying to establish a good rep¬ 
utation scholastically on which they hope to live during 
the following years—live in the loafing way which the 
Dean describes above. It is no credit to a fraternity 
if its freshmen maintain high stands while its upper¬ 
classmen deride scholarship. If this proves anything, 
it proves that the influence of the fraternity on schol¬ 
arship is bad. 

‘‘Even men of the highest scholastic standing,” says 
Dean Clark, ‘‘seem to lower their average when they 
get into groups exceeding a dozen. It has been re¬ 
marked at the University of Illinois that the members 
of Tau Beta Pi, one of the best known of the honor¬ 
ary engineering fraternities, very often have a drop in 
their scholarship standing when they move into the 
Tau Beta Pi house.” 

‘‘The charges of immorality and extravagance have 
little foundation,” says Dean Clark; and yet, at the 
end of the same paragraph he adds: ‘‘I should be 
foolish to argue that there are not immoralities in col¬ 
lege fraternities, and I am willing to grant that when 
these exist among the members of such an organization, 
the evil result may be more far-reaching than when 


64 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 

such irregularities are seen in an individual.** In regard 
to extravagance (a charge which he here states has 
little foundation), it is amusing to note the following 
statement of his in the Greek Exchange. “I have never 
known a greater desire for the extravagant expenditure 
of money among fraternity men than at the present 
time.’* Bearing this and other statements in mind, note 
the contradiction in the following: “The fight against 
fraternities is based upon the fact that people on the 
outside say that fraternity life leads men to dissipation 
and extravagance, makes them loafers and flunkers 
and snobs, and unfits them for the serious, worthy 
work of life. The intimate relations which I have had 
with fraternities and fraternity men for almost half 
my life have not led me to such conclusions.** It must 
have been in the other half of his life that he met the 
snobs at the “fraternity parties.’* And may we ask if 
he is on the outside or the inside when he claims: 
“There are too many loafers at our fraternity houses, 
and too little discouraging of loafing.** The following 
statement offers an interesting analysis: “My exper¬ 
ience has been that the faults and dissipations attri¬ 
buted to fraternities exists in much smaller degree than 
is generally supposed, and yet not proportionately in 
any way materially greater degree than would on 
investigation be discovered in the general student 
body.’* Now note that the Dean also states: “The 
greatest service that the fraternity does for the under¬ 
graduate is to set before him high ideals of living.’* 
Why, then, are not the faults and dissipations of fra¬ 
ternity men proportionately in a materially less degree 
than in the general student body? 

We have learned, according to Dean Clark, that 
the influence of the upperclassmen in a fraternity is bad 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 65 


on the scholarship and the manners of its freshmen. Is 
this true in other respects also? Note the following 
story told by the Dean to illustrate how the upper¬ 
classman undertakes to “train** the freshman and the 
success with which he does so: “It all reminded me of 
a senior who was very fond of Pall Malls but who 
thought it undesirable for his freshman brother to 
indulge. Every evening *09 sent young ’ 12 up to his 
room to study while he remained in the living room to 
enjoy his own cigarette. Upstairs little brother was 
not engaged solving algebric formulae as he was sup¬ 
posed, but was quietly puffing away at his own cig¬ 
arette.** This is only one of the many thrusts which 
the Dean takes at the character of Big Brother Greek, 
and from them we are very willing to conclude that 
the out-going senior of a fraternity is in many ways 
inferior to the in-coming freshman. “I could give in¬ 
numerable illustrations of men elected to the heads of 
fraternities because they were popular, because they 
were good athletes, because they had been the longest 
in the chapter, because they were good fellows, but 
without the slightest fitness to be in control of the 
house.** Or, to be more explicit: “I have in mind now 
one fraternity in which the oldest man is without moral 
ideals and the only senior is a weakling, and yet one 
or the other of those two men is likely to be chosen 
president of the organization.** And again: “A man 
can’t be free from responsibility for half or three- 
fourths of his college life and then drop into it natur¬ 
ally and effectively. Because he is kept from it so 
iong is, I believe, one of the main reasons of our hav¬ 
ing so many weak, inefficient seniors who are willing 
to hold office or to be at the head of affairs but who 
are not capable of real, strong efficient leadership.** 
In quoting the following words of an upperclassman. 


66 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


the Dean reveals the inferiority of the upperclassman 
and also how the fraternity thwarts the development of 
responsibility: “Why he is constantly offering suggest¬ 
ions and making criticisms of our methods; and the 
most annoying part of it is, he is usually right. But of 
course you can see that we never allow a freshman to 
tell us what we ought to do even if he is right.” 

Having compared the fraternity upperclassman with 
the fraternity freshman, let us next see how the Dean 
compares the general fraternity man with the independ¬ 
ent. The following statement not only contradicts some 
of the quotations which I have already given but others 
which I am going to give: “They are made of the 
same sort of dust: socially, intellectually, financially 
and morally, there are no appreciable differences be¬ 
tween them. Their interests are identical; their envir¬ 
onment is in no large degree dissimilar; there is no 
difference excepting that one is a member of an organ¬ 
ization and the other is not. The only way we can 
make a real difference is by imagining one and talking 
about it. It is this talking about it that does the most 
of the damage and stirs up the useless trouble. We 
shall wipe out the differences which are said to exist 
between Greeks and independents when we refuse to 
recognize the fact that there are any.” 

Such talk as this is ludicrous and, coming from a 
Dean of Men, incredible. A man may well refuse to 
recognize fancies but when he refuses to recognize 
facts, few will care to recognize him. Fortunately, 
Dean Clark has not refused to recognize facts; he has 
told us a score of ways in which Brother Greek differs 
from the independent, and these differences are some¬ 
thing more than imagination on his part; and it is his 
talking about them that is going to stir up the useful 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 67 


(not useless) trouble and do not most of the damage 
but most of the good. 

As to the difference in environment, it is interesting 
to note what the Dean has said elsewhere: “The fra¬ 
ternity freshman, surrounded as he usually is by a 
large group of congenial companions, is more likely 
than other first-year men to fall into the error of wast¬ 
ing his time. If he desires to go down town, there is 
always some one to bear him company; if he draws up 
his chair to join the circle of fireside bums, there is 
so much that is interesting going on that it is hard at 
the proper time to break away.” 

This quotation shows the disadvantages of such an 
environment which is “in no large degree dissimilar” 
from that of the independent. As to the advantages of 
such an environment, he says: “The Greek is natur¬ 
ally helped in the accomplishment of any undertaking 
which he begins while the independent is not. The 
latter therefore if he wins in any undertaking must be 
the stronger, the more self-reliant, the shrewder of the 
two, and he frequently shows that he is.” This envir¬ 
onment then is not an advantage but rather a detriment 
to strong, self-reliant men; it is an advantage only to 
the average or inferior man, for, according to Dean 
Clark, “the man who does not belong to a fraternity 
has no organization behind him, no one to goad him 
if he gets lazy, so even when he has a good chance of 
winning he often becomes discouraged and drops out.” 
But excellent as this theory of the Worthy Grand 
Chief is, it does not seem to hitch up with his statement 
of fact that “there are too many loafers at our frater¬ 
nity houses and too little discouraging of loafing,” 
whereby he gives us the impression that there is less of 
the goading spirit among fraternity men than among 
independents who are probably in lesser need of it. 


68 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


It is true that the non-fraternity man who is failing is 
more likely to drop out; but is it not a greater virtue to 
drop out of a position for which we are unfit and to 
place ourselves in one better adapted than to “hang 
around’* nourished by the false encouragement of one’s 
“brothers?” Let the Dean recall his report that in a 
period of four years an average of 50% of the frater¬ 
nity men at Illinois did not graduate, one particular 
fraternity having as high as 85% non-graduates. 

Dean Clark tells us that the reasons why there are 
not more strong leaders among independents is ex¬ 
plained by the fact that as soon as the man begins to 
show qualities of leadership in his sophomore or junior 
class, he is immediately picked up by a fraternity, 
from which it is evident that his independence and not 
the Greek letter fraternity brought out the qualities of 
leadership. From statements quoted earlier, it appeared 
that the Dean has no particular praise for the 
“strength” of the fraternity leaders who have “been 
the longest in the chapter.” But if the fraternity does 
show wisdom in picking its leaders from the independ¬ 
ents in the sophomore and junior classes, it does not, 
according to the Dean, display much sense in selecting 
its freshmen. 

“•The fellow who can talk easily, dress well and 
make good with the girls is not infrequently considered 
more desirable than one who has intellectual ambitions 
and sterling moral principles but who is less character¬ 
ized by social finesse.o.The fact that a man is a ‘good 
fellow* with personal charm and attractiveness should 
not overbalance the fact that he is a vulgar profane 
talker or that he has unclean habits.” 

“I have heard one man, pretty wise and experienced 
in fraternity affairs, offer to bet that he could take 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 69 


almost any man, inconspicuously dressed, moderately 
good looking, and not too hopelessly unsophisticated 
and get him pledged within a week just by introducing 
him to a few fraternities during the rushing season and 
starting a little competition.*’ 

“I have seen fraternity men give more thought and 
attention in going into the pedigree, history and win¬ 
ning points of a bull pup they were about to take into 
their household than they did to the qualities of the 
young fellow they were about to pledge as a brother.” 

“In many cases these men under discussion are of 
such a character that it would be a credit to any fra¬ 
ternity to lose them.” 

These remarks lead one to wonder if the fraternity 
could not be given a really beneficial purpose in the 
academic world: a device for trapping all the unde¬ 
sirable material which is to be thrown overboard. 

The fraternities throughout the country who have 
either one of Dean Clark’s books in their libraries no 
doubt feel that, despite its critical nature, it was writ¬ 
ten with the idea of advancing their cause. As a 
defense of these organizations, it is to me genuinely 
idiotic. It is true that he has said some good things 
about the Greeks which I have not emphasized— 
which I could not possibly emphasize sufficiently to 
counteract the evils with which his books are loaded. 
The idea of pointing out defects with a view to remov¬ 
ing them and thus reforming conditions is praiseworthy 
and generally accomplishes its end if the defects them¬ 
selves do not predominate; but if they are the very 
making of the organization itself, then emphasizing 
them means death. It seems that the fraternities do 
have ideals, but in order to be a good fellow and a 
popular member one must necessarily violate them one 


70 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


and all. If in order to be a successful fraternity man 
one must violate the ideals of the fraternity, why not 
change the ideals to read: Impoliteness, Indolence, 
Dishonesty, Poor Scholarship, Extravagance and 
Immorality. 

While an organization may claim to have ideals, it 
is, after all, only an independent individual who can 
have ideals and live up to them. To speak of the 
ideals of a fraternity is meaningless rot, for that would 
mean the sum total of the “ideals” of all its members 
including the “fireside bums,” and there could be 
nothing pure white about such a mixture. 

Dean Clark hits the nail on the head when he says: 
“The young man going into a fraternity carries with 
him his own ideals and personality and these no not 
materially change simply because he changes his lodg¬ 
ing place. The fraternity man may develop but the 
fraternity seldom makes over its men. The man who 
bases his hopes of mental and moral reform upon the 
fraternity is likely to be disappointed.” 

It is very likely that the college fraternities hoped 
to quell a great deal of the criticism which had been 
heaped up against them before the War by taking an 
active and extensive part in the Great Conflict. Pat¬ 
riotism was a garb used to disguise a multitude of 
selfish schemes, and the fraternities, like many other 
organizations, prepared to make ample use of it. It 
was a great blow to the Greeks, however, when they 
were informed by the War Department that fraternity 
activities were “incompatible with military discipline” 
and that the operation of fraternities should be sus¬ 
pended during the War. In the report of the Executive 
Committee, James Duane Livingston, President of the 
Interfraternity Conference, said in regard to this 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 71 


notice: “We agreed that unless we met the situation 
promptly, there was a great danger that the life of 
college fraternities would be seriously endangered and 
a possible prohibition placed on their continuance.” 
He went on to show how the representatives of the 
fraternities, instead of being willing to forget their 
Greek letters and to become American soldiers fight¬ 
ing for Democracy, undertook to fight selfishly for the 
preservation of their own clans. In a memorandum to 
Colonel R. I. Rees of the War Department, Mr. 
Livingston, representing the Interfraternity Conference 
—“composed of forty men’s fraternities, located in 
several hundred universities and colleges and having a 
membership of approximately 500,000 men, and 
property of more than $12,000,000”—did consider¬ 
able gushing, claiming among other things that the 
fraternities “have the highest ideas of Honor, Truth 
and the privileges of American citizenship,” that “of 
the college men, the fraternity men have been and are 
the leaders,” and that they “have no social clevage,” 
(Will the reader please compare Mr. Livingston’s 
mental aberations and his opportunity (?) for oberva- 
tion with the facts related by the Dean of Men?) and 
that therefore, “the War Department should make it 
plain that it does not desire the suspension of the life 
of the fraternities etc., etc.” This memorandum did 
not seem to make much of an impression on the War 
Department where, queer as it may seem, the strongest 
opposition came from a fraternity man (who could 
therefore be neither “ignorant” nor “jealous”). “If 
Major Joy was permitted to impress his opinion on the 
committee, the American college fraternities would be 
killed.” From all appearances the Interfraternity Con¬ 
ference had to sweat blood to obtain a modification of 
the original official statement of the purposes of the 


72 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


War Department in its establishment of the S. A. T. 
C. and its bearing on fraternities—a statement which 
set the fraternity world in an uproar. The modifica¬ 
tion, however, was obtained: “that no restriction shall 
be placed on fraternity activities, including initiations 
and meetings, except such as are clearly necessary to 
preserve proper military training and discipline. In 
determining what, if any, restrictions are essential, 
commanding officers will exercise tact and good judg¬ 
ment.” In case the commanding officer happened to 
be a fraternity man (and we shall learn that he most 
frequently was) with the lack of good judgment and 
the Lose sense of leadership and responsibility which 
Dean Clark attributes in “innumerable” cases to those 
who “control” the chapter house, it is left to the 
reader’s imagination as to “what, if any, restrictions” 
would be placed on the evils which the Dean has 
enumerated. Thus, the college fraternity, with all its 
“ideals” was allowed to march on during the course 
of the War, and Education lost the wonderful oppor¬ 
tunity which proved so effective for Prohibition. In 
concluding his report, Mr. Livingston said: “We feel 
that we have established before the world an impreg¬ 
nable position. We have fought the fight; we have 
kept the faith.” 

The part which the college fraternities played in the 
war has been painted big and bright by their saviours: 
it has been estimated that 99% of the commissions in 
the army were held by fraternity men. 

And here comes up a question which we should like 
Dean Clark to answer for us: If, as he states, there 
is no difference between fraternity men and independ¬ 
ents, if the Greek has “very little” on the independent 
as far as social prestige is concerned, then why were 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 73 

the commissions monopolized by the Greeks? Why 
were they not equally divided among Greeks and 
independents? This brings us to the biggest criticism 
that is made against the fraternity: the unfairness which 
continues to exist after graduation in the world at 
large. If two men are candidates for the same posi¬ 
tion, the Greek, just because he is a member of a 
national fraternity of influence, will frequently be 
given preference even though the independent has more 
character and ability. 

So this unfair prestige, so clearly revealed by the 
War and to which the Greeks point with pride, is not 
at all an indication that college fraternities should be 
continued, but a very sound argument for their aboli¬ 
tion. 

In fact, if we study the figures more carefully, we 
will find that the 99% has nothing at all behind it in 
which the Greeks may take any real pride. That same 
estimate that credits 99% of the commissions to the 
Greeks also states that the fraternity men made up 
90% of the college men in the War, although they 
comprise only 25% of all college graduates. If this 
estimate is meant to give the impression that of all the 
college men who were drafted only 10% were non¬ 
fraternity men, it is positively asinine; if it is meant 
to give the impression that of the drafted college men 
who were actually on the field, 90% were fraternity 
men, there is no reason to object seriously—for this 
may be absolutely true, considering the fact that thous¬ 
ands of drafted college men were retained at home 
for positions which demanded brain rather than brawn 
and the satisfaction found in worthy and secluded 
mental labor, rather than the conceited and restless 
desire to parade in khaki and stripes. (For the com¬ 
missioned officers are not always the ones who do the 


74 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


actual fighting on the field, even though they are the 
first to enlist.) 

If the Greeks had been as anxious to make a 99% 
record in scholarship, it would have given them more 
ground for pride. As President Wilson’s message to 
the colleges indicated, rushing off to war was not the 
only way—in fact, not the best way—for an educated 
man to show his patriotism. Perhaps a paragraph 
from Dean Clark’s book will throw some light on the 
99% which will make the Greeks wish they had kept 
their estimate in the dark: “Among those who enlisted, 
there was, of course, a large number among that class 
of undergraduates who have no special purpose in 
coming to college, who have no liking for study or for 
books and who would be likely to seize the first oppor¬ 
tunity to get release from the rather commonplace and 
unexciting life they were living. The man keen for 
adventure, eager for a new experience, the college 
loafer, in fact, was among the first to go.** 

Why is it safe not only to prophesy that Brother 
Greek will pass but even to state that he is already 
passing? 

It is not because he has already passed out of cer¬ 
tain institutions through the action of state legislatures 
or that of the presidents and faculties,—for the number 
of chapters which have been abolished is probably 
small compared to the number which are constantly be¬ 
ing established elsewhere. Indeed, it is very likely that 
there was never a time in the history of the college 
fraternity so flourishing as the present. 

But the fact that a movement is growing is no argu¬ 
ment for or indication of its permanence. The liquor 
traffic, before its sudden fall, was one of the most 
gigantic and seemingly most powerful organizations in 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 75 

America. And think of Hohenzollernism—until re¬ 
cently regarded as the most extensive and potent thing 
in the World! 

It is interesting to note that the college fraternities 
were ardent supporters of the liquor traffic and are in 
some respects not unlike the Hohenzollerns themselves. 
Out of an active membership of 24, one chapter was 
recently said to contain 18 sons and younger brothers 
of former members, while a certain graduate boasts 
that he has three sons, four nephews and a cousin who 
are members of Phi Gamma Delta. 

But I do not base my prophecy on comparison and 
similarity. That which most strongly indicates the 
passing of Brother Greek is the expression of his own 
unconscious wish for and his conscious fear of exter¬ 
mination. It was this fear far more than his patriot¬ 
ism that accounted for his 99% grade, although this 
grade has by no means abated his fear since it has 
intensified rather than diminished criticism. The fear 
of the Greeks concerning their “impregnable” position 
is reflected in the following quotations from recent 
numbers of Bantas Greek Exchange. 

“Once they (the farmers in the West) are possessed 
of the idea that their sons are discriminated against, 
they will rise up and smash fraternities out of exis¬ 
tence.” 

“While it is true that the delegates of the Confer¬ 
ence have been uneasily sensing the troubles that are 
about us . . .** 

“These older men realize that fraternities are on 
trial as they have seldom if ever been before.” 

“Among the many questions in this country which 
have attracted the attention of the students is the prop¬ 
aganda directed against the college fraternity system.” 

“Particularly in these critical days with anti- 


76 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


fraternity feeling alarmingly on the increase.” 

Another thing that is “alarming” the Greeks is 
indicated by the following statements of Francis W. 
Shepardson, President of Beta Theta Pi, in one of the 
new issues of the Greek Exchange: 

“From almost every college and university in the 
country, the reports come of record-breaking attend¬ 
ance and of exceptionally large lower classes. The 
prophets have begun to forecast the future. Their 
hopeful statistics indicate that colleges which have 
hundreds will have thousands, and that those which 
now enroll thousands will have tens of thousands. Will 
the growth of the student body make the fraternity 
impossible? Just take a university of ten thousand 
students as an example, that is ten thousand men. One 
thousand of these are given the opportunity to belong 
to some one of the thirty fraternities. Three thousand 
others have fraternal instincts and fraternal values. 
What about them? What will happen seems perfectly 
plain. The three thousand will unite with the other 
five thousand in the university to crush out the selected 
thousand who wear fraternity badges.” 

And so Mr. Shepardson comes to the same con¬ 
clusion that Dean Clark reached in a later issue of the 
Exchange: “It is a choice between expansion and 
extermination.” 

It is plain that Dean Clark, in spite of his conscious 
wish for expansion, unconsciously desires extermination. 
It is hard to believe, after reading his superb indict¬ 
ment of the fraternities, that there is way back in his 
unconscious mind a desire to see more and larger chap¬ 
ters. And even his conscious expression for expansion 
would mean that the old evils would spread (to say 
nothing of the new as yet unseen defects and compli¬ 
cations which invaribly come into view with enlarge- 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 77 


ment) so that the system would automatically exter¬ 
minate itself by choking the intellectual growth of the 
college at which it would thrive. 

Is not Dean Clark expressing his own opinion in 
camouflage when he quotes the following words of a 
prominent physician: “I believe it will not be many 
more years until all of these college fraternities, either 
by the enactment of state laws or by the regulations of 
college authorities, will be debarred from our educa¬ 
tional institutions and will have to go out of the busi- 

»t 

ness. 

It is clear that the fraternity must ultimately pass 
out of the colleges,—but something must come to re¬ 
place it. 

Frederick P. Keppel, formerly Dean at Columbia 
University and later connected with the War Depart¬ 
ment at the time the ban was about to be placed on 
fraternities, wrote in regard to their abolition: “Until 
we find a better vehicle for a certain kind of training 
that boys need, I am inclined to think, though many 
of my academic friends would disagree, we had better 
stick to the machinery that has grown up spontan¬ 
eously.” 

The fallacy in such an attitude lies in the fact that 
the “better vehicle” will never be found (or at least 
never be used if found) as long as we “stick to the 
present machinery.” Even Abraham Lincoln, who 
stood unflaggingly for the abolition of slavery, contin¬ 
ued to wear his old hat after his wife had bought him 
a new one, which he probably did not don until she 
threw the old one away or gave it to some one to 
cover a mind whose thoughts were more in keeping 
with its deteriorated condition. But one cannot go 
out and buy a new social system as one would a new 


78 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


hat. It is a thing which must be found while it is 
being used and used while it is being found. If the 
present system is scrapped- but not until then, the new 
system will grow up like the old one. Let the students 
paddle around a while with no social system at all. 
Let us not forget that the older Greek-letter fraterni¬ 
ties of today were literary societies in their infancy. 

Recently, owing to the prohibition of fraternities, 
several sub rosa organizations sprang into existence at 
the University of Mississippi. The recognized 
National Fraternities voted not to countenance them. 
By so doing they were, in a sense, discountenancing 
themselves, for many of the younger fraternities of 
today had just such a birth. I am not defending the 
guilty students at Mississippi any more than I would 
defend moonshiners and those persons who now distill 
their own liquor. The case is quite analagous to 
National Prohibition. Before that arrived we had 
local option, and if we had not had that to study the 
beneficial results to certain communities, we would 
never have seen the arrival of national enforcement. 
The fact that a certain class of men with seemingly 
innate appetites still crave liquor and get it or make it 
illicitly is no argument for the repeal of the Volstead 
Act or the Eighteenth Amendment any more than the 
sub rosa organizations are an argument against the 
suppression of chapter houses. And it is this attitude 
that the Greeks at institutions in other states must event¬ 
ually take. It is they, rather than the sub rosa fraterni¬ 
ties who are doing the harm by legalizing a harm. The 
acquired appetite will gradually vanish when the cause 
of it is removed. If a group of men who are unable 
to control acquired desires must secretly continue their 
carousing, the evil is not likely to spread; but when 
the law puts its stamp of approval either directly or 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 79 


indirectly on such habits, then the younger generation 
acquires them also, from which many narrow-minded 
persons conclude that the habit is natural and innate 
and that every effort made to suppress it is an obstacle 
in the path of freedom, whereas, it is only another at¬ 
tempt to release the human race from slavery. The col¬ 
lege fraternities must be suppressed everywhere event¬ 
ually in spite of the unhealthy sub rosa organizations 
that spring up like toadstools as a result of such action. 

And they must be suppressed completely. When 
a dentist finds a decayed spot in a tooth, he removes 
not only the decayed part but no small part of the 
tooth around the decayed part which has been unseem- 
ingly affected by it; otherwise his good work is in vain, 
and the relief is only temporary. The suppression of 
the Greek-letter fraternities cannot be brought about 
by substituting something similar with the constituency 
of near-beer. In this connection one naturally thinks 
of the Clubs at Princeton which were recently under 
fire. The Princeton system, no doubt, has its faults 
like any other, but, at the same time, it is rather hope¬ 
ful to know that there were no Princeton men included 
in the 99% of commissions in the army; for the 
Princeton Clubs are in no way affiliated with the 
Greeks. When a Princeton graduate gets a position, 
it is because he is a Princeton man—not a Psi U from 
God knows where. But Princeton’s next step is to 
localize her democracy now that she has succeeded in 
nationalizing it. The effort now being made at Stan¬ 
ford University to do away with chapter houses and 
put all fraternity men indiscriminately in dormitories 
is also a step in the right direction in that it will help 
to minimize the evils on the campus in so far as the 
return of graduates is concerned (which I will consider 
in the next paragraph), but it will do nothing what- 


80 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


ever to abolish the most unfair and far-reaching influ¬ 
ence of the whole Greek System: the “pull** after 
graduation of which the 99% is the best example. 

The college and not the fraternity should be the 
magnet which draws the alumni together at commence¬ 
ment time and on other occasions. The new social 
system must be one which will tend to bring a whole 
class back as a unit, rather than a number of cliques 
made up of groups of men from various classes. The 
latter defect has lead to the “inheritance** of many 
an evil and has helped to undo the beneficial work 
which younger active members with cleaner and fresh¬ 
er ideas are trying to perform. Note what Dean 
Clark, quoting an undergraduate, has to say here: 
“We have a house rule against drinking, but if our 
alumni are not furnished with something to drink, 
they will be out of humor, will make us all unhappy 
and will probably bring liquor into the house no matter 
what we say against it. One such experience will 
ruin all the good work which may have been done by 
the officers of the active chapter during the year.** 

Or, to avoid the monotony of always quoting one 
man but to show that he is not alone in his views, note 
the following words of Henry C. Chiles, Knight Com¬ 
mander of Kappa Alpha (Southern) : “If the alumnus 
comes back to the chapter house, loaded with booze, 
ready to start a poker game and relate his experiences 
in the red light district of the nearest city, furnish 
addresses, etc., he can do more harm in ten minutes 
than the Province Commander can eradicate in all 
his official visits and ‘Big Brother’ talks.*’ 

This quotation is enlightening in that it reveals 
both the good and the bad influences of the Graduate 
Greeks, and, what is more important, which influence 
is the stronger. The good influence of those alumni 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 81 


who constitute the inter-fraternity Conference should 
not be ignored, but at the same time they should be 
plainly told that their predominant aim is the selfish 
one to preserve the chapters to which they belong, 
whereas, their advertised aim to bring about cleaner 
living among students could be most effectively accom¬ 
plished by abolishng these chapters. 

It is a mystery to me (but mystery seems to be an 
element on which fraternities thrive) how the Greek 
idea has lasted as long as it has. The classics are no 
longer in vogue; and Greek, in particular, is fast 
losing (if it has not already lost) the important place 
it once held on the curriculum. It seems ancient- 
fashioned that the college fraternities should still cling 
to the characters of this alphabet as insignia for the 
various orders. I also observe that Bantas Creek 
Exchange which is the official publication of the Inter¬ 
fraternity Conference and which reprints articles from 
the separate periodicals of the national fraternities, has 
recently enlarged the size of its page, thereby necessi¬ 
tating a new standard cover-design, which shows the 
ruins and crumbling pillars of an ancient Grecian 
Temple. I should think the Conference would have 
taken this opportunity to make a refreshing change, pre¬ 
ferring to symbolize their activities by something with 
a significance radically different from these crumbling 
pillars which (like the original literary purpose of the 
fraternities themselves) were once upon a time very 
beautiful but are now undergoing degeneration. And 
I should also think that organizations like these which 
claim to be 100% American would select a cover- 
design which reflected more of the spirit and surround¬ 
ings of their own country. 

May the new social system of our colleges, when 
it comes, be something which will make us quite obliv- 


82 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


ious of the old Greek system which has, in vain, been 
given a stretch of almost a hundred years in which to 
make good and whose purpose of “helping a brother 
in distress” has, owing to the vicissitudes of the last 
decade, now been outgrown. And instead of being 
100% Greek, may it be at least 99% American in 
its make-up! 

While Maine and Kansas were leaders in the sense 
that they were the first to introduce Prohibition, they 
were not leaders in the sense that other states were at 
once willing to imitate them. But after a few of the 
more influential states took up the cause, it did not 
take long for the others to follow unanimously in their 
footsteps. The colleges and universities which have 
completely suppressed the Greek-letter fraternities are 
not leaders in the latter sense of the word. It remains 
for one of our more influential institutions to prohibit 
the activities of the Greeks and then it will not be so 
very long until the entire academic world will be bene¬ 
fited. 

An illustration of such an action was recently fur¬ 
nished by the announcement of the Yale Corporation 
to raise the standard of teaching and the salary of the 
teacher, which resulted in a nation-wide following on 
the part of all American colleges and universities of 
repute. There were started a series of campaigns for 
raising funds among alumni which surpassed in extent 
and success anything that has ever been undertaken 
in educational America as a whole. This action was 
undeniably the supreme achievement of President Had¬ 
ley’s administration; it by far outweighs the Yale 
Bowl and the Harkness Memorial together. 

It is my prophecy that Yale will also take the lead 
in abolishing the Greek-letter fraternity. I say this 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 83 


not because I selfishly wish to see my Alma Mater 
leading in so many great movements of today but 
because at present there is no other university which 
has quite the opportunity for effecting such a reform. 
Although all our colleges have undergone more or 
less reconstruction as a result of and since the war, the 
change has not been so radical as that experienced at 
New Haven, in consequence of which the undergrad¬ 
uate social system has suffered more than any other 
tradition and is now holding out its arms for relief or 
(that being improbable) death. 

Yale has two large undergraduate departments: 
the College (or Academic department) and the Shef¬ 
field Scientific School, which were more separate and 
antagonistic in regard to their fraternities than they 
were in regard to their faculties. The two departments 
were, however, not entirely distinct, the Scientific 
School conducting a “Select” course which was decid¬ 
edly academic (and lenient) in its nature but differed 
from the Academic courses in that it required, like all 
other Sheffield courses, only three years for completion. 
Needless to say the larger percentage of Sheffield 
fraternity men hailed from the “Select” course. The 
features of Yale’s Reconstruction which most sorely 
affected the social system were the lengthening of the 
Scientific School courses to four years, the subse¬ 
quent dicontinuance of the “Select” course and the 
introduction of a “Common” freshman class for both 
departments. 

Now when a boy enters Yale, even though he has 
decided in advance which department he will enter 
in his sophomore year, he is, when a freshman, really 
a member of neither department but of both. It is 
not hard to imagine the difficulties of the “rushing” 
season of the two groups of societies under such cir- 


84 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


cumstances. The natural outcome was the ruling that 
all pledging of freshmen during the “Common” fresh¬ 
men year would be prohibited. It is easy to foresee 
how a student, who has spent the first year in college, 
unhampered by the Greeks wrangling over the posses¬ 
sion of his carcass, may desire to spend the remaining 
three years in similar freedom—for the “golden haze” 
of college days will look quite different through the 
eyes of an independent sophomore who has successfully 
completed his first year than it does to the incoming 
freshman who innocently believes that “not to make 
a frat” spells failure in everything. 

Various things have occurred during the first “Com¬ 
mon” freshman year which indicate the “alarming” 
condition of the social system and foreshadow ap¬ 
proaching changes. 

Early in the fall, the Aurelian Honor Society of 
the Sheffield Scientific School offered a prize for an 
essay giving the best solution of the fraternity problems 
as they exist in Yale today, “due consideration to be 
given to the conditions newly arisen from the common 
freshman year.” 

The fact that the Yale Alumni Weekly is “a pub¬ 
lication looked upon as in some sense an official organ” 
was sarcastically emphasized by a Sheffield authority 
because one of its editorials stated that “the dropping 
of the Select Course, from which most of the Sheff 
Fraternities drew their membership, dealt a blow to 
the Sheff Societies that has been staggering. It is 
said that one of these societies can see but a single 
member next year.” 

As a result of an infringement of the rule concern¬ 
ing the pledging of freshmen, four members of one of 
the Sheffield fraternities (possibly the one that could 
see only a single member for the next year) were sus- 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 85 


pended from the Sheffield Scientific School until the 
opening of the second term, seven freshmen were pro¬ 
hibited from ever joining that fraternity, and the 
fraternity itself was to be set back three days in pledg¬ 
ing men during the regular rushing season. 

The guilty fraternity then withdrew from the Inter¬ 
fraternity Agreement whereupon the Sheffield authority 
intensified the penalties by announcing that the frater¬ 
nity would be debarred from pledging any member of 
the first “Common” freshman class prior to the close 
of his sophomore year, that the fraternity dormitory 
must be vacated and remain unoccupied by under¬ 
graduate members until the close of June examina¬ 
tions, and that the period of suspension of the four 
individual members would be lengthened by three 
months. 

While this “imbroglio” was distinctly a Sheffield 
affair, it should be noted that the senior class of the 
College which graduated at the end of the first “Com¬ 
mon” freshman year were by no means unanimous in 
registering their opinions on Yale’s traditional 
social system, only thirty-eight being “loyal” enough 
to think it the “most desirable.” The suggestions 
for drastic modification on the part of the others 
indicate that something of a revolutionary nature 
will likely go into effect sooner or later, the Yale 
News emphasizing, by placing at the head of the 
list, the views of those who would “abandon the whole 
thing as medieval and childish.” 

It is interesting to note that James Rowland Angell 
(himself a fraternity man), who, at the end of the 
first “Common” freshman year, was inaugurated as 
Yale’s new President, in his first speech before a Yale 
undergraduate audience during the “imbroglio” said, 
referring indirectly to “all kinds of social clubs and 


86 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


other organizations that fall outside the strict academic 
work,” that even though it teaches men ‘‘how to put 
across a particular job,” the extra-curriculum activity 
should be condemned and elimated if it interferes 
with academic work and does not create intellectual 
enthusiasms. 

• 

And now, with this highly scholastic attitude of 
Yale’s new President before us, let me lead up to the 
philosophy of a man who, though he was as far from 
being a ‘‘good fellow” as he was from being a bad one, 
must be classed among America’s greater scholars if not 
singled out as her greatest and whose views should 
rightly bring to a close an article dealing not with the 
fellowship craved for by the masses but with the edu¬ 
cation of incipient leaders in whom intellect should 
undeniably tower above those cheaper social instincts 
which strive to smother it. 

If I am a friend of X’s, and if X is a friend of 
yours, it by no means follows that my characteristics 
will not clash with yours or yours with mine. This 
clash, however, need not disturb my friendship with 
X unless we all live together intimately, eating always 
at the same table or conversing always around the same 
fireside—which is the situation in a college fraternity. 
For the fraternty is not always the congenial group 
of men that the Greeks would have us believe they are. 
The squabbles that occur over the selection of new 
members are undoubtedly continued in a suppressed 
form after the undesirables are admitted. The antag¬ 
onism among the Greeks of the same fraternity is 
likely to be of a more poisonous nature than that be¬ 
tween Greeks and independents, because it lacks the 
openness of the latter. As Dean Clark informs us: 
‘‘The true fraternity man will hesitate before discus- 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 87 


sing with an outsider the differences of opinion or the 
unpleasant relationships which are likely to develop in 
any chapter. Every fraternity, as every family, has 
its skeleton, its blot on the escutcheon, but those should 
not be paraded before the public.” 

However, sometimes the Greeks of one fraternity 
give vent to their feelings against those of another, and, 
as is recorded in fraternity history, when Greek meets 
Greek, the fights between “barbarians” are pale in 
comparison. 

Dean Clark very frequently compares joining a 
fraternity with getting married; and, by means of the 
analogy, he solves, to his own satisfaction, many of 
*he problems of the various chapters. To me, however, 
his comparisons are more amusing than they are enlight¬ 
ening. He seems to forget that a fraternity consists 
of more than one individual and that when a student 
makes it he is “marrying” himself to all of its mem¬ 
bers. When a man marries, he must, in this same 
sense, “marry” all the members of his wife’s family 
however severely his own ideas may clash with theirs. 
But marriage, from this point of view, is evidently 
a necessary evil; pologamy, however, is not. Just 
because a man has a very close friend with whom he 
shares his room is no reason why he should “marry” 
all his friend’s friends; but this is just what he does 
when he joins a fraternity. A means of divorce from 
this imposed “pologamy” is the crying need of the 
social system in our colleges today to avoid the suppres¬ 
sed hatred which it engenders not only between Greeks 
and independents but among Greeks themselves. 

This hatred is entirely eliminated when friendships 
are not organized. However, youth feels that he needs 
an organized host of friends to help him “put across 
a particular job.” He is far more interested in putting 


88 THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 


the job across than he is in the character of the job 
itself, and he, therefore, blindly prefers quantity to 
quality and acquaintances of short duration to more 
genuine later-life associations. How many of the 
numerous friendships formed in college are other than 
ephemeral, even though the memory of some of them 
lasts a long while? And after all, what permanence 
have the successes which such friendships, rather than 
our own efforts, attain for us? Are not these offices 
and prizer, which we are want to cherish all too highly, 
filled and awarded with clock-like regularity each year 
not only at our own colleges but at all colleges. And 
do they, therefore, indicate any real individuality on 
the part of the holder? It is true that they have a 
value in that they teach us the cheap and short cuts to 
success which are to be avoided in our real life’s 
work. The more friends a man has, the harder it is 
for him to separate himself from them and the longer 
he will be held back from that attainment which is 
to differentiate him from the swarm and its mediocre 
achievements. The truer our friends are, the more 
reluctant will they become to disturb us with their 
constant presence and detract our attention from those 
of our thoughts which reflect originality and which 
demand considerable seclusion and a certain degree 
of unpopularity to ripen them into the deeds which 
will disseminate good influences among our fellowmen. 

And yet, even though we are not dealing with the 
masses, we cannot expect the new social system of our 
colleges to be too ideal in its make-up; but it must con¬ 
tain no small percentage of the above element which is 
entirely lacking in the present system of the Greeks. 
We will most assuredly continue to associate with and 
strive to uplift not only an isolated group of men but 
the entire student body, and we shall indeed assemble 


THE PASSING OF BROTHER GREEK 89 


often in that body around the inviting woodfires of 
large democratic meeting-houses to exchange greetings 
and ideas. The student body may be divided up into 
various clubs or squads of changeable rather than 
fixed and hereditary membership for the purpose of 
debate or intramural athletics—but, not for social 
isolation; for our particular friendships (and we shall 
be too slow rather than too hasty in forming them) will 
be too precious to be organized with others and annoy¬ 
ed incessantly by vulgar and unwelcome intimacies 
which are forced upon us without the sanction of the 
soul. 

As Emerson has said, the highest form of friendship 
demands the ability to do without it. If this seems 
absurd to most of us, let us modify it to read: the 
ability to postpone it. Perhaps this is the meaning the 
great philosopher himself really intended to convey 
when he made use of the exaggeration which he 
claimed was necessary in every statement which aims 
to hit the mark; for elsewhere he wrote: “The lone¬ 
liest man, after twenty years, discovers that he stood 
in a circle of friends, who will then show like a close 
fraternity held by some masonic tie.” 


A Book That Has Worked Revolutions ! 
TEN YEARS AT YALE 

A Series of Papers 
On Certain Defects in 
the University World of Today 

By George Frederick Gundelfinger 

CONTENTS: Insanity, A Defense of Pessimism, The 
Evil of Tutoring, The Folly of Research, Osculating 
Circles, The Decline of Teaching , The Art of Bluffing, 
The Disrespect for Scholarship, Fraternity and Idol- 
Worship, The Failure to Educate, A Scene from “The 
Ice Lens ,” Lux et Veritas, The Approaching Reform 
Wave. 


A very plainspoken writer is George F. Gundelfinger. 
Yet there is undoubtedly a vast amount of truth in the 
accusations made by him not only against Yale under¬ 
graduates but against those of other colleges. His book 
contains a candid exposition of unpleasant facts com¬ 
monly ignored in university towns and rarely referred 
to in polite society. 

—Milwaukee Free Press. 


It is difficult to deny that much that Mr. Gundelfinger 
says of Yale is true, and as well of every great university 
as seen by those who have observed carefully. There 
is a frankness of style, directness of statement and 





literary character that are enjoyable, aside from the 
matter which is the result of the author’s observation 
and experiences. The criticisms cut clean and to the 
quick. 

—Newark Star. 


Mr. Gundelfinger leaves praise to optimistic after- 
dinner orators and confines his remarks to some unlively 
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—Indianapolis News. 


Ten Years at Yale is a most unique production, brist¬ 
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—Kentucky High School Journal. 


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THE GREAT RELIEVER 
A Play in Four Acts 
By George Frederick Gundelfinger 


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THE ICE LENS 
A Play in Four Acts 
By George Frederick Gundelfinger 


What! What! There are those who will regard this 
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—Wisconsin News. 

The Ice Lens is brilliantly purposeful—a fine and 
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—The Hamiltonian. 


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THE NEW FRATERNITY 
A Novel of University) Life 
By George Frederick Gundelfinger 


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traps cunningly laid for the young men entering college, 
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— Dr. E. Elmer Keeler in 
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MY DISMISSAL FROM THE CARNEGIE 
INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 
By George Frederick Gundelfinger 


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—An Editor. 

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THREE LOVE SONGS 


I Think of You 
(price 75c, postpaid) 

All the World is in Love 
(price 60c, postpaid) 

Wonderful Glorious Spring 
(price 60c, postpaid) 


Lyrics and Music 
By George Frederick Gundelfinger 


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